Biology
Scientific paper
May 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000dda....31.0109l&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DDA Meeting #31, #01.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.857
Biology
Scientific paper
The dynamical structure of the outer planetary system has played a critical role in determining the sizes, numbers, and habitability of the terrestrial planets. In 1996, Wetherill showed that the presence of Jupiter affects the masses of planets in the Habitable Zone of the Sun. In addition, in our solar system the giant planets control the dynamics of most of Earth's impactors, which consist of objects from the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, the scattered comet disk, and the Oort cloud. At early times, these impactors may have been responsible for supplying the Earth with a significant fraction of its water, organics, and atmospheric volatiles. At later times, they are responsible for causing at least some mass extinctions. Recent observations have demonstrated that giant planet configurations can show startling variations from system to system. (Although the searches for extra-solar planets have yet to reveal anything about what `typical systems' are like due to strong observational biases.) The question therefore naturally arises: What kind of outer planetary systems can support habitable terrestrial planets? The Exobiology Program is funding us to undertake the first comprehensive study of the coupling between outer solar system architectures and inner solar system habitability. The first stage of this program was to construct a wide range of outer planetary systems. The results of this work can be found at www.boulder.swri.edu/ hal/diversity.html. Here we present a preliminary report on simulations of the formation of terrestrial planets in two of these synthetic outer planetary systems. The first contains 5 planets; three of which lie between 3.7 and 11AU and have a combined mass of 2600 Earth-masses ( 8 Jupiter-masses). The second system contains 7 planets between 4 and 35AU; the largest of which is only 26 Earth-masses ( 1.5 Neptune masses).
Agnor Craig Bruce
Duncan Martin J.
Levison Harold F.
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