Firstly, says Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian team, it suggests that further planetary systems await detection.
Astronomers said Thursday the two planets could provide clues to how planetary systems are formed, and aid the search for extraterrestrial life.
While this new model could explain Earth's relative lack of water, it shouldn't be extended to all newly forming planetary systems, researchers said.
MSN: Earth's hot formation may be reason behind water shortage
The researchers, led by Sean Raymond, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, carried out computer simulations of gas giant migration in forming planetary systems.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Earth-like planets may be common
The team concluded that about one of every three known planetary systems could harbour Earth-like planets in habitable zones further out than the Hot Jupiters.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Earth-like planets may be common
All in all, the new research adds 20 new planetary systems to the 47 that Kepler had previously confirmed, marking a more than 40 percent increase.
According to Dr Bally, unless planetary systems form very quickly after a star is born, they are bound to be rare occurring around only about 5% of stars.
The team's computer simulations further suggest that these disruptions generally happen only in planetary systems that extend at least 10 AU or so from the host star.
Those who study other planetary systems have been more restrained.
ECONOMIST: Time to start giving extrasolar planets proper names
"The message did not arrive at the device meant to deploy the chute, " said Gentry Lee, chief engineer of planetary systems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope -- designed to reveal the first galaxies ever formed in the universe and to study other planetary systems -- could far surpass Hubble's discoveries.
Just over 50 extrasolar planetary systems have so far been discovered and analysis of them shows just how unusual our local system is with its giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) positioned well away from the Sun.
"Given that most planet-detection campaigns cannot detect planets beyond 5-10 AU from their host stars, our results provide new clues about the characteristics of planetary systems in a regime that is poorly constrained by current observations, " Kaib told SPACE.com.
"There is no agreement by the astrobiology community on how to measure habitability, " said Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, who is working on several planetary indexing systems.
"The eccentric planetary orbits seen in these systems are essentially scars from past disruptions caused by the companion star, " co-author Sean Raymond, of the University of Bordeaux and the National Center for Scientific Research in France, said in a statement.
Such destabilization, which is more dramatic in wide binaries than in more tightly orbiting two-star systems, does not always take the form of planetary ejection.
This pending move back to planetary science from earth sub-orbit comes on the heels of improvements in pointing systems and instrument technologies that will allow ground-based controllers to fine-tune balloon payloads to include one-meter class optical and infrared telescopes.
FORBES: Budgets Nudge NASA Toward Balloon-Based Planetary Science: First Target? Comet ISON
应用推荐