I use that paper all the time! I can't believe it was almost rejected!!

If you are hiring this fall, keep an eye out for Marguerite Epstein-Martin, a dynamicist who works across 10^8 orders of magnitude in central body mass!

Marguerite's previous work spans time-evolution of AGN disks to secular resonances in young protoplanetary disks. In this new paper, she computes where in AGN disks stellar-mass BH binaries may survive, and when they will be stochastically forced out of resonance.

I also wrote a blog post with a level of detail in between this post and the paper itself: becker.astro.wisc.edu/2025/10/09/n...

I am an assistant professor at UW-Madison in the Department of Astronomy, and would like to share new research results.

yes

So if you want the water to survive, the planet has to migrate late enough that the white dwarf has cooled and is not so bright in the XUV.

Losing mass loss via Jeans escape is actually not easy (thermolysis occurs at 2000 K or hotter, and bonded H20 is very heavy and hard to lose). Photoevaporation will make the water vapor escape very easily, and white dwarfs are luminous in the XUV when young...

Great question - we actually wrote a paper addressing just this: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025ApJ.... You are 100% right that this process requires high ecc and will cause tidal heating. The main effect (on water) of the tidal heating is to evaporate liquid water into the atmosphere as water vapor.

Good question!! And Svetoslav is right, previous work by Madhusudhan et al. (arxiv.org/abs/2108.10888) found that Hycean planets are actually likely habitable to much lager distances due to their large masses which lead to large pressure & subsurface ocean (even if the top layer is ice, like Europa)

What does that mean? If a Hycean planet has a giant outer companion, tidal forces can perturb it out of the habitable zone, even if the incident stellar flux looks fine. You can find the accepted paper here:

Here is a plot from Joseph's paper showing the effect - the transparent region was the location of the known habitable zone, the opaque region is the updated limits including tidal heating. For low mass stars, tides can make a difference!