PARIS: More than 1,900 exoplanets or alien planets are present around other stars. Now, a new research has claimed that these alien planets can help each other in their existence. The researchers said that alien planets present close to each other around the same parent star can help each other when it comes to supporting life, creating ‘multihabitable systems’.
The research paper is of great importance as it is beging suggested in earlier studies that billions of exoplanets are potentially habitable in the Milky Way. Lately, researchers have discovered two exoplanets around the star Kepler-36 that are so close to each other they can witness a planetrise akin to moonrise on earth.
Their parent star is Kepler-36, which is located around 1,200 light years from earth in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan). Study’s lead researcher Jason Steffen at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas said that the discovery of the two planets has given birth to the possibility of multi-habitable systems having two or more earths-sized planets orbiting near each other in the habitable zones of their stars.
To know how the life would be on such planets, the researchers made many computer models that simulated multi-habitable systems. As per the researchers, climate would be one of the things that would be stable in such multi-habitable systems.
Seasons and climate on earth are dependent on its obliquity. A change in obliquity of only a few degrees can lead to an ice age, but as per the researchers, chances of such a thing to happen are very rare that gravitational interactions between planets on closely neighboring orbits would lead to bigger changes in the obliquities of the orbits of those worlds.