To most common terrestrial dwellers, there's no place like Earth. But new simulations show that many Earth-like planets might exist outside of our solar system.
Through computer simulations scientists examined the formation and evolution of giant planet systems recently detected outside the Earth's solar system. Their results revealed that more than a third of them might contain planets that could potentially support life and could even be covered with deep oceans.
The study focuses on a type of planetary system unlike our solar system that contains gas giants known as "hot Jupiters" orbiting extremely close to their parent stars-even closer than Mercury to our sun, said lead author Sean Raymond, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Hot Jupiters are giant gas planets, with masses close to or greater than that of Jupiter's, orbiting around stars other than our sun.
These giants are believed to have migrated inward toward their parent stars as the planetary systems were forming, disrupting the space environment and triggering the formation of ocean-covered, Earth-like planets in a "habitable zone" conducive to the formation of life, the scientists reported in the Sept. 8 issue of the journal Science.
Scientists had previously thought that as hot Jupiters plowed through the dense gaseous material on their inward migrations toward parent stars, all the surrounding material would be either "vacuumed up" or ejected from the system, Raymondsaid. "The new models indicate these early ideas were probably wrong."
"I think there are definitely habitable planets out there," Raymond said. "But any life on these planets could be very different from ours. There are a lot of evolutionary steps in between the formation of such planets in other systems and the presence of life forms looking back at us."
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