Superhabitable world

A superhabitable world is a hypothetical type of planet or moon that is better suited than Earth for the emergence and evolution of life. The concept was introduced in a 2014 paper by René Heller and John Armstrong, in which they criticized the language used in the search for habitable exoplanets and proposed clarifications. The authors argued that knowing whether a world is located within the star's habitable zone is insufficient to determine its habitability, that the principle of mediocrity cannot adequately explain why Earth should represent the archetypal habitable world, and that the prevailing model of characterization was geocentric or anthropocentric in nature. Instead, they proposed a biocentric approach that prioritized astrophysical characteristics affecting the abundance and variety of life on a world's surface.

If a world posesses more diverse flora and fauna than there are on Earth, then it would empirically show that its natural environment is more hospitable to life. To identify such a world, one should consider its geological processes, formation age, atmospheric composition, ocean coverage, and the type of star that it orbits. In other words, a superhabitable world would likely be larger, warmer, and older than Earth, with an evenly-distributed ocean, and orbiting a K-type main-sequence star. In 2020, astronomers, building on Heller and Armstrong's hypothesis, identified 24 potentially superhabitable exoplanets based on measured characteristics that fit these criteria.