Galactic Environments of the Sun and Cool Stars
by P. C. Frisch
This talk was the opening scientific talk at the conference on
Planetary Systems --
The Long View, held in Blois, France, June 23-28 1997. It will be
published in 1998 in a book of the same title, with editors
L. M. Celnikier and J. Tran Than Van, by Editions Frontieres.
ABSTRACT
The importance of understanding the current and historical galactic
environments
of cool stars is discussed. The penetration of interstellar gas into a
stellar astrosphere
is a function of the interaction of the star with the interstellar cloud
surrounding the
star, and this factor needs to be understood if an efficient search
for life-bearing planets is to be made. For the Sun, both current and
historical
galactic conditions are such that if a solar wind were present, it
would have excluded
most inflowing interstellar matter from the inner regions of the
heliosphere for the past few million years. Variations in heliosphere size over the recent historical path of the
Sun are estimated, along with estimates of astrosphere sizes for
selected nearby stars.
Considering only possible effects due to encounters with
interstellar clouds, stable planetary
climates are more likely for inner than outer planets.
The paper reference number of this paper on the Los Alamos
server is:
astro-ph/9804008
Postscript files:
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gzipped Text (80 kb; on a unix machine
unpack this with "gzip blois.ps")
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Last Updated -- April 1998