I'm trying to find out how wide the Sun's habitable zone is and am not having much luck with Google or Wikipedia. Can anyone here help me?

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It varies by estimator and the estimator's definition of habitable zone.

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Wikipedia's definition (and likely others) is based on 1 AU from a star with the sun's luminosity. The zone's width is from .95 to 1.37 of this mean average.

Welcome to BAUT Forum, Rhaedas.

I have seen other different definitions. I'm sorry: my main point, I shall now make explicit, was that Grashtel could make an answer more reliable by defining the thing for which the feature statistic is sought.

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1 is not the mean or average of .95 and 1.37. The Wikipedia editors are stuck on the notion that Earth's current orbit must be at the center of the Sun's habitable zone, which causes them to use some misleading language.

The 0.95 to 1.37 comes from planetary climate models that suggest an Earth-like planet would surely experience a runaway greenhouse if it were closer than 0.95 AU and a CO₂ freeze-out if it were further than 1.37 AU.

In the 1990s James Kasting used various criteria to determine the long-term habitable zone around a Sun-like main-sequence star (ie the zone that would remain habitable for the first 4.6 billion years of the star's main-sequence lifetime).

The inner edge is the distance at which liquid water would be broken down to hydrogen and oxygen by photolysis and so be lost from an Earthlike planet. He set this at 0.95 AU.

Two different criteria were used to estimate the outer edge of the habitable zone. One gives the point at which CO₂ starts to condense out of the atmosphere: 1.37 AU. The other gives the point at which there could still be enough water vapour and CO₂ in the atmosphere to make an Earthlike planet habitable by means of the greenhouse effect: 1.67 AU.

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