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 ➡️ https://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.

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.