The Habitability of Proxima Centauri b: II: Environmental States and Observational Discriminants Victoria S. Meadows1,2,3, Giada N. Arney1,2, Edward W. Schwieterman1,2, Jacob Lustig-Yaeger1,2, Andrew P. Lincowski1,2, Tyler Robinson4,2, Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman5,2, Rory K. Barnes1,2, David P. Fleming1,2, Russell Deitrick1,2, Rodrigo Luger1,2, Peter E. Driscoll6,2, Thomas R. Quinn1,2, David Crisp7,2 1Astronomy Department, University of Washington, Box 951580, Seattle, WA 98195 2NASA Astrobiology Institute – Virtual Planetary Laboratory Lead Team, USA 3E-mail:
[email protected] 4Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, 5Planetary Environments Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771 6Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC 7Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, M/S 183-501, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 Abstract Proxima Centauri b provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand the evolution and nature of terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarfs. Although Proxima Cen b orbits within its star’s habitable zone, multiple plausible evolutionary paths could have generated different environments that may or may not be habitable. Here we use 1D coupled climate-photochemical models to generate self- consistent atmospheres for several of the evolutionary scenarios predicted in our companion paper (Barnes et al., 2016). These include high-O2, high-CO2, and more Earth-like atmospheres, with either oxidizing or reducing compositions. We show that these modeled environments can be habitable or uninhabitable at Proxima Cen b’s position in the habitable zone. We use radiative transfer models to generate synthetic spectra and thermal phase curves for these simulated environments, and use instrument models to explore our ability to discriminate between possible planetary states.