Hot Jupiters

Alien solar systems that are home to so-called "hot Jupiters" — gas giants circling sizzlingly close to their stars — are unlikely homes for Earth-like planets, researchers say.Hot Jupiters get their name from the fact that they are approximately Jupiter's size, but extraordinarily near their stars, at about a tenth of the distance from Mercury to our sun. These roaster planets are among the alien worlds that astronomers have discovered most often since their size and proximity to their parent stars mean they exert large gravitational tugs on their hosts that scientists can readily spot.This planet-finding technique, known as the "wobble method," detects the presence of giant planet near a star by the wobble motion induced on the star by the planet's gravity. The closer and larger the alien planet is, the more pronounced the wobble.To explain how hot Jupiters form, researchers have developed two broad classes of explanations — one that also predicts the presence of nearby companion pla...

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