University of California, Riverside | 2020 Jul 31
New insight to inform future NASA missions
Our solar system has one habitable planet — Earth. A new study shows other stars could have as many as seven Earth-like planets in the absence of a gas giant like Jupiter. ...
The search for life in outer space is typically focused on what scientists call the “habitable zone,” which is the area around a star in which an orbiting planet could have liquid water oceans — a condition for life as we know it.
Kane had been studying a nearby solar system called Trappist-1, which has three Earth-like planets in its habitable zone. ...
His team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. An algorithm accounted for gravitational forces and helped test how the planets interacted with each other over millions of years.
They found it is possible for some stars to support as many as seven, and that a star like our sun could potentially support six planets with liquid water. ...
Dynamical Packing in the Habitable Zone: The Case of Beta CVn ~ Stephen R. Kane et al
- Astronomical Journal 160(2):81 (2020 Aug) DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab9ffe
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2006.13962 > 24 Jun 2020 (v1), 20 Jul 2020 (v3)
