Oral Presentation

Plant distribution simulation and observation on habitable planet

Duo Cui, Feng Tian, Yuwei Wang, Tong Li, Chaoqing Yu, Changsheng Li

Habitable planets are earth-mass planets with liquid water on the planet surface. At the current technique level, most habitable planets to be discovered and characterized in the next one or two decades will be around M dwarfs. Many works have studied the climate patterns of habitable planets around M dwarfs. However relative few works has been carried out to investigate how climate patterns might have influenced the distribution of life on such planets.
The habitable planets show two different climates, eyeball pattern and striped ball pattern depending on different spin-orbit resonance numbers by using 3D GCM. The climate is closely related to grass growth on global scale.
In this work, we use the exoplanet climate data from simulations as input data of the DNDC (denitrification-decomposition) model, a model tracing the carbon and nitrogen cycle in an ecosystem based on biogeochemical principles of terrestrial planets, to produce the spatial and temporal distributions of Earth-like photosynthesis plants on habitable exoplanets around M dwarfs. We then use a radiative transfer model to understand how to observe possible life on such exoplanets.