The week beginning 30th November 2015 has seen the release of two papers relating to habitability; one is concerned with exoplanet systems, while the other deals with a body much closer to home.

A paper by Steffen et al., published on the ArXiv pre-print server on Monday 30th November (arXiv:1511.09211) looks at the habitability of pairs of planets in the habitable zone of a star. By examining the topic of lithopanspermia, as well as orbital resonance, the authors conclude that pairs of planets in close proximity are indeed conducive to life.

Moving back into the Solar system, a paper in Nature by Hu et al. (previously published, but now available on the ArXiv at arXiv:1512.00758) considers atmospheric evolution on Mars, finding that no large carbon reservoir is necessary to explain current measurements. This has important implications for Mars' history and potential past habitability.