Habitable zone around a Blue Supergiant
I am writing a story centered around a planet orbiting a Blue Supergiant star. What I want to know is how far away a planet would have to be to be in the habitable zone of such a star. The star I have in mind is roughly comparable to Rigel and don't mind anything like the need for protection from radiation, the race that inhabits this world can handle radiation and the likes of solar flares to the point they basically thrive in radiation that would utterly destroy a human.
Some side questions I have are these:
How many Earth years would 1 year on this planet be?
Would the 4 seasons still be roughly equally divided in that year?
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1 answer
Ok, so using Rigel as an example:
Rigel has a luminosity of 120,000 sols, so for a planet to receive the same insolation as the Earth does around the sun, it would orbit at a distance of 346.4 AU.
Given a stellar mass of 23 sols, and a planetary mass of 1 Earth, the year length is 1344.09 Earth years.
Seasons are tricky since they have to do with the axial tilt of the planet, and given the year length, precession could actually cause the seasons to shift within that time.
You should also be aware that the spectrum of the host star has an effect of the strength of ice albedo feedback in the climate of planets. It is possible that around a Blue Giant, that more of the total insolation would be reflected back into space, so this hypothetical planet could very well be an irradiated snowball.
Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6926
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