Weird Exoplanet Orbits Could Screw Up Alien Life

astroengine writes "Life is good in the Solar System. We have Jupiter to thank for that. However, if the gas giant's orbit were a little more elliptical, there's every chance that Earth would become rather uncomfortable very quickly. Researchers looking at the zoo of exoplanets orbiting distant stars have simulated several scenarios of differing exoplanet orbits and find that many don't resemble our cozy Solar System. In fact, weird exoplanet orbits may be the deciding factor as to whether extraterrestrial life can form or not."

Comments

"Weird"?

[sznupi]

If anything, all of this could be mean that our system is quite weird; at least on average.

And probably still wouldn't be a problem for "life" in general, considering there are several places suspected of harboring life in our own system, all of them quite "hostile" at first sight.

Complex life is another thing, of course... (or - we're frakked, because the aliens will turn out to be total badasses; due to evolving in very harsh conditions ;p )

Re:"Weird"?

[Wiarumas]

But perhaps a badass exoskeleton life form wouldn't be that smart. Think of the Alien movies... they were highly evolved, but not really intelligent. Probably because they became such efficient killers that they never had to outsmart other animals. Which, as a result, would mean that unless we had to conquer a planet, we would never encounter such beasts. And if we did, I would hope that science would have had made enough advances allow us to effectively kill them seeing that we were able to overcome intergalactic travel.

Re:Um yeah.

[confused one]

You've hit the nail on the head. We're seeing these systems because either the gas giant is so close to the star that it obviously occludes the light and affects the radial acceleration of the star, or because their orbit extends far enough out from the star that it intersects with and modifies the surrounding debris cloud (think Oort).

Kepler and COROT are starting to return results. They'll need a decade or two to identify Jupiters and Kepler will need 4 or 5 years to identify an Earth or Mars.

Re:Life adapts

[TheRaven64]

The problem is expecting life to continue to adapt if it lives on a tropical shore for millions of years, then the next year the sea freezes. A lot of factors have contributed to the evolution of life on Earth. Jupiter is large enough that it captures most large chunks of rock that could cause mass extinctions. A few have it Earth, but not nearly as many as without a large gas giant. If these happen too frequently, it's hard for the ecosystem to recover. We needed one thought to split off the moon. Without the tidal forces, the surface radioactivity would be much lower and mutation rates would be very low, meaning that evolutionary changes would take longer. Intelligent life might still have evolved, but it would have taken a lot longer.

Re:Save the aliens!

[mcgrew]

Has anyone considered that to them, we are the aliens? The link is a story about how our own solar system is uninhabited, and why.