My latest (and likely last!) paper is up on arXiv today! As the title says, it's about the "Relative Habitability of Exoplanet Systems with Two Giant Planets".

Go check it out ➡️ arxiv.org/abs/2205.02777

Or for a TL;DR, continue ⬇️

The basic idea is, given an exoplanet system with 2 giant planets, what can we say—from a dynamical perspective—about its ability to host a habitable Earth-like planet?

We focus here on whether the system would be stable and how the exo-Earth's eccentricity would be changed.

Unstable systems (planets ejecting or colliding): not habitable. Easy enough, except the question of whether an arbitrary 3-planet system is stable is, um, HARD. In this case, I used a bunch of different predictive techniques that have been developed by other scientists.

The question of whether an Earth-like planet is habitable and a given semi-major axis and eccentricity is likewise HARD. I (intentionally) use a very simple model here based on existing work in the field. This framework is very adaptable with other habitability models!

In general, as the exo-Earth's eccentricity increases, it gets more sunlight from its star, making it less habitable in the inner regions and more habitable in the outer regions.

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For each giant planet pair, we consider 80 different locations of the exo-Earth. At each of these locations, we find the stability and habitability probabilities. Then we can integrate over the exo-Earth locations to find a relative habitability for the giant planet pair.

We looked at 147,456 different pairs of giant planets! This dataset is huge and 8-dimensional, so there's a LOT remaining to be found in it! You can play around with it yourself at: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6324216

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A couple trends we saw:

• Mass of the giant planets ↑, relative habitability ↓
• Very low relative habitability when the giant planets are in the habitable zone
• Eccentricity of the giant planets ↑, relative habitability ↓
• Secular resonances can have big effects

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While in general the presence of the giant planets reduces the relative habitability compared to a system with just an exo-Earth, there are some cases where the giant planets make the system "ultra-habitable":

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If this thread got you excited, you can also watch me talk about this research: youtu.be/0smzHsburh8?t=1847

Ty!! 😊

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@norasguidetothegalaxy congrat for this ! it's really cool you can do a PhD defense _and_ a great learning video in one shot ... I enjoyed it all ;)

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