We humans are always curious about the existence of life on other planets. Recent NASA missions like Kepler and TESS have discovered over 5600 confirmed exoplanets. Future missions like the Habitable World Observatory aim to find planets suitable for life. Most habitability studies define a life-supporting planet as a rocky exoplanet with the right atmosphere to maintain liquid water on its surface or beneath an ice crust. However, due to its complexity and lack of observations, the estimation of habitable zones did not previously consider magnetic activities like flares and coronal mass ejections. Low-mass stars, particularly K-M type stars, exhibit frequent superflare events, and the associated 'geoeffective' CMEs containing energetic particles also substantially affect planetary atmospheres. At NASA, I am working on approximately 6500 flares-CME events to understand the extreme activities and accurately determine the habitable zone radii. This will provide essential information for finding the correct habitable worlds!
Dr. Karmakar is currently a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory of the Astrophysics Science Division at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA), Marina, California, USA, between 2021-2023, and a postdoctoral researcher at PRL, Ahmedabad, between 2018-2020. He completed his Ph.D in ARIES, Nainital, in 2018. His current research focuses on probing the relationship between stellar X-ray flaring events and coronal mass ejections on a large sample of K-M dwarfs and re-evaluating the habitable zones incorporating the effects of stellar activities.