Does a world as in Game of Throne exist?  -- Extreme environments on exoplanets

Xie Mo

Vejleder: Hans Kjeldsen

Tirsdag 15. december kl. 16.15
Fysisk Auditorium

Since the first extrasolar planet discovered was 20 years ago, more than 1800 exoplanets has been confirmed up to today. All this time, we have never giving up on searching for twins of the Earth.  With the greatest hope of finding or even meeting another intelligent life on these exoplanets, it is important to predict the nature of the environments on them before sending a mission to one.

Some of the exoplanets can have extreme environments due to a number of different reasons, such as the effects from their host star(s), the shape of their trajectories and their spin axis directions. The planet in the popular novels and TV series <Game of Thrones> is one of these worlds: the seasons are unpredictable and the winter can be unbearably long.

‘Winter is coming’, became the most feared thing to the civilization depicted in the story as the weather will freeze dramatically and might last for generations.  But could this world exist and if so, can it really be that terrible? In this talk, I am going to look at the stellar and planetary factors that lead to extreme environments on exoplanets and discuss whether any of these factors can result in a world like the one in <Game of Thrones>.