Could K2-18b be habitable, and what does the star allow?

Exoplanet Research Apprentice · cfa.harvard.edu ↗

A temperate super-Earth 124 light-years away, modeled with TESS data and Exofast on Harvard’s Canon cluster, planet and host star treated as one system.

K2-18b · TESS · Exofast · NASA Exoplanet Archive · ExoFOP · Canon cluster

Artist impression of exoplanet K2-18b — K2-18b habitability apprenticeshipExoplanet research

The question

Habitability is not a single number. Assessing K2-18b meant joint work on mass, orbit, and atmospheric conditions while keeping the host star’s properties in view, what the planet does only makes sense if the stellar context is honest.

Method

I used TESS data and Exofast modeling, pulling from the NASA Exoplanet Archive and ExoFOP, and ran computations on Harvard’s Canon cluster. The apprenticeship was as much about scientific hygiene, provenance, assumptions, what the instruments can and cannot say, as about any single fitted parameter.