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From National Geographic: "Hot Jupiters" Could Give Rise to Earthlike Worlds, Study Says

- Hank

I think this is really interesting work... Sean Raymond has a good research webpage with links to most of his work (his thesis is rather fascinating!).

http://lasp.colorado.edu/~raymond/research.html

The Science paper's not on his site though. I've read it though, it's worth getting hold of if you can.

I've also downloaded the MERCURY program, which is some planetary accretion code that he's used, you can get it from John Chambers' website here: http://www.arm.ac.uk/~jec/home.html

Be warned, it's rather complicated to use, and you need to have a fortran compiler (works fine if compiled in windows though).

Looks like I'll have to wait until I get back to university to get my hands on that paper, looks very interesting.

I have my doubts about just how habitable a deep ocean world would be though... if you end up with so much water that an ice layer forms between the ocean and the core you could run into difficulties with a mineral-starved ocean.

Would an additional gas giant remaining at Jupiter-like distances (e.g. the 55 Cancri system) reduce the water delivered to levels at which you could end up with dry land?

How about a late collision with a smaller planet-sized object, like the one which may have formed the Earth's Moon?

This could conceivably remove enough water to make the object habitable.
I am guessing that in such a collision a proportion of the water/ice would be vapourised and fail to fall back onto the planet, though this might be wrong.

Do you suppose Raymond's modelling software anticipates such late collisions?

eburacum45 wrote:How about a late collision with a smaller planet-sized object, like the one which may have formed the Earth's Moon?

This could conceivably remove enough water to make the object habitable.
I am guessing that in such a collision a proportion of the water/ice would be vapourised and fail to fall back onto the planet, though this might be wrong.

Do you suppose Raymond's modelling software anticipates such late collisions?

I think I read in his thesis at least that it doesn't, no. It does however incorporate the ADDITIOn of water by collisions with more volatile rich planetesimals.

I always did find the theory that hot-jupiters preclude smaller outer worlds unaesthetic, and its nice to see that the converse may be true.

Maybe we'll find systems that are the reverse of our own... a Jovian in close orbit, then an asteroid belt farther out, then smaller rocky worlds. I'm starting to think there are very few permutations that are not possible. Maybe my solar system generator ain't so daft after all

Regards to all,

Cormie

The paper is now on arXiv.

I have still to read the pdf paper but I'm already enthusiastic: this could mean apparently hot barren planets have not disrupted the habitable zone. I wait for the discovery of a Earth-mass planet around, for example, 70 Virginis, HD 108147, HD 114762, Gliese 436 and much more...