In the conventional habitable zone (HZ) concept, a CO-HO greenhouse maintains surface liquid water. Through the water-mediated carbonate-silicate weathering cycle, atmospheric CO partial pressure (pCO) responds to changes in surface temperature, stabilizing the climate over geologic timescales. We show that this weathering feedback ought to produce a log-linear relationship between pCO and incident flux on Earth-like planets in the HZ. However, this trend has scatter because geophysical and physicochemical parameters can vary, such as land area for weathering and CO outgassing fluxes. Using a coupled climate and carbonate-silicate weathering model, we quantify the likely scatter in pCO with orbital distance throughout the HZ. From this dispersion, we predict a two-dimensional relationship between incident flux and pCO in the HZ and show that it could be detected from at least 83 (2σ) Earth-like exoplanet observations. If fewer Earth-like exoplanets are observed, testing the HZ hypothesis from this relationship could be difficult.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19896-2 | DOI Listing |
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