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Originally Posted by Doodler
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Originally Posted by Ilya
Most people assume that "hot Jupiters" make life-bearing planets impossible, as they had scattered all Earth-size planets in the course of their spiraling toward the star. I think that assumption ignores the possibility of terrestrial planets forming AFTER the "hot Jupiter" settled into its final orbit.
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That's entirely dependent on when the hot Jupiter stopped migrating relative to the dispersal of the dust disk.
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Of course.
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Could a planet like Earth even exist around a star where a hot Jupiter exists?
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Absolutely. A stable orbit around a
double star is possible if the stars are less than 1/4 of the planet's orbit apart. The Juipiter-mass body provides much less perturbation.
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Also, I remember reading a paper a few years back when these things first popped up that epistellar Jovians caused superflares on their parent stars, wouldn't this make life a little uncomfortable?
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For OUR life, yes - at least the land kind. But on a planet which has always been subjected to such flares, life would develop accordingly. Frequent bursts of ultraviolet radiation are no worse than some things Earth life managed to adapt to. (Not the least being the incredibly corrosive gas known as oxygen

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