We have exactly one world, in all the Universe, that we know for a fact to be hospitable to life: ours.
Increasingly, it has seemed that a Jupiter-like gas giant in the same system might be a good indicator for habitability. But there seem to be some caveats.in which they showed, based on simulations, that altering the orbit of Jupiter could very quickly make the entire Solar System unstable.
So, tweak Jupiter's eccentricity, and the gravitational effect it will have on the other planets is real. But if you move Jupiter closer to the Sun, Earth's habitability suffers. That's because it will cause our home planet to tilt more sharply on its rotational axis than it does currently, a feature that gives us seasonal variations.
These results can be applied to any multi-planet systems we find, to assess them for potential habitability, the researchers said.
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