The Stability of the Orbits of Earth-mass Planets in and near the Habitable Zones of Known Exoplanetary Systems
extrasolar
Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0305500
From: David R. Underwood <d.r.underwood@open.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 08:55:49 GMT (426kb)
The Stability of the Orbits of Earth-mass Planets in and near the
Habitable Zones of Known Exoplanetary Systems
Authors:
Barrie W Jones,
David R Underwood,
P Nick Sleep
Comments: 6 pages, 2 Figures, Heidelberg Conference titled “The Search for
Other Earths”
We have shown that Earth-mass planets could survive in variously restricted
regions of the habitable zones (HZs) of most of a sample of nine of the 93
main-sequence exoplanetary systems confirmed by May 2003. In a preliminary
extrapolation of our results to the other systems, we estimate that roughly a
third of the 93 systems might be able to have Earth-mass planets in stable,
confined orbits somewhere in their HZs. Clearly, these systems should be high
on the target list for exploration for terrestrial planets. We have reached
this conclusion by launching putative Earth-mass planets in various orbits and
following their fate with a mixed-variable symplectic integrator.
Full-text: PDF only
References and citations for this submission:
SLAC-SPIRES HEP (refers to ,
cited by, arXiv reformatted)
