Related papers: Giant planets: good neighbors for habitable worlds…
The detection of many extrasolar gas giants with high eccentricities indicates that dynamical instabilities in planetary systems are common. These instabilities can alter the orbits of gas giants as well as the orbits of terrestrial planets…
The architecture of a planetary system can influence the habitability of a planet via orbital effects, particularly in the areas of stability and eccentricity. Some of these effects are readily apparent, particularly when they occur on…
Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…
With more than 260 extrasolar planetary systems discovered to-date, the search for habitable planets has found new grounds. Unlike our solar system, the stars of many of these planets are hosts to eccentric or close-in giant bodies. Several…
The giant planets of the solar system likely played a large role in shaping the architecture of the terrestrial planets. Using an updated collision model, we conduct a suite of high resolution N-body integrations to probe the relationship…
Giant planets have key role in shaping planetary systems. Their composition reveals information on the conditions at which planets form, and their interiors serve as natural laboratories to explore the behavior of materials at extreme…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
Gas giant planets are far easier than terrestrial planets to detect around other stars, and are thought to form much more quickly than terrestrial planets. Thus, in systems with giant planets, the late stages of terrestrial planet formation…
The galactic environment has been suspected to influence planetary habitability in many ways. Very metal-poor regions of the Galaxy, or those largely devoid of atoms more massive than H and He, are thought to be unable to form habitable…
We present a brief overview of the main effects by which a star will have an impact (positive or negative) on the surface habitability of planets in orbit around it. Specifically, we review how spectral, spatial and temporal variations in…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
Understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of habitable planets in extrasolar planetary systems is a challenging task. In this respect, systems with multiple giant planets and/or multiple stars present special complications. The…
Gas giant planets play a fundamental role in shaping the orbital architecture of planetary systems and in affecting the delivery of volatile materials to terrestrial planets in the habitable zones. Current theories of gas giant planet…
The orbital distributions of currently observed extrasolar giant planets allow marginally stable orbits for hypothetical, terrestrial planets. In this paper, we propose that many of these systems may not have additional planets on these…
Close-in giant planets (e.g. ``Hot Jupiters'') are thought to form far from their host stars and migrate inward, through the terrestrial planet zone, via torques with a massive gaseous disk. Here we simulate terrestrial planet growth during…
Giant planets are tens to thousands of times as massive as the Earth, and many times as large. Most of their volumes are occupied by hydrogen and helium, the primary constituents of the protostellar disks from which they formed.…
The large eccentricities of many giant extrasolar planets may represent the endpoint of gravitational scattering in initially more crowded systems. If so, the early evolution of the giant planets is likely to be more restrictive of…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
The presence of ``Hot Jupiters'', Jovian mass planets with very short orbital periods orbiting nearby main sequence stars, has been proposed to be primarily due to the orbital migration of planets formed in orbits initially much further…
In the near future we will have ground- and space-based telescopes that are designed to observe and characterize Earth-like planets. While attention is focused on exoplanets orbiting main sequence stars, more than 150 exoplanets have…