Agnostic Machine Learning Model of Photosynthetic Habitability
Researchers have developed an agnostic model for the Photosynthetic Habitable Zone (PHZ) based on thermodynamics and redox chemistry, eliminating Earth-centric biases found in previous estimates. By optimizing a generic photochemical reaction against exoplanet irradiance spectra using a genetic algorithm, the study predicts that photosynthetic viability declines linearly with orbital distance rather than quadratically.