Star Trek Dreams Crushed: No Vulcan Could Live On Giant Planet Of Epsilon Eridani

Sound of Trumpet wrote:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1717285/posts

Hubble observations confirm that planets form from disks around stars [
Epsilon Eridani b ]

That's not what genesis says. See you in hell with the rest of the
evolutionists, heretic.

Sound of Trumpet wrote:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1717285/posts



Hubble observations confirm that planets form from disks around stars [
Epsilon Eridani b ]



[...]


Epsilon Eridani has long captivated the attention of science fiction
writers, as well as astronomers. In 1960, years before the first
extrasolar planet was detected, astronomer Frank Drake listened for
radio transmissions from inhabitants of any possible planets around
Epsilon Eridani as part of Project Ozma's search for intelligent
extraterrestrial life. In the fictional "Star Trek" universe, Epsilon
Eridani is considered by some fans to be the parent star for the planet
Vulcan, Mr. Spock's home.

No Vulcan or any other alien could live on this gas giant planet.



Indeed. There is no planet Vulcan, and in the time when Jesus was
supposed to live, there was no town of Nazareth.


No such planet as Vulcan = no Spock.

No such town as Nazareth = no Jesus.


Or perhaps ... in the first century, on the place of today's Nazareth
was a GRAVEYARD - maybe Jesus and his family were zombies - or ghouls -
or perhaps even VAMPIRES! This would explain the thing with drinking
blood and "eternal life" :-)))



http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html


Nazareth -The Town that Theology Built


The Lost City

The Gospels tell us that Jesus's home town was the 'City of Nazareth'
('polis Natzoree'):


And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a
CITY of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose
name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was
Mary.
(Luke1.26,27)

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph
also went up from Galilee, out of the CITY of Nazareth, into Judaea,
unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; because he was of
the house and lineage of David:
(Luke 2.3,4)

But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of
his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being
warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee:
And he came and dwelt in a CITY called Nazareth: that it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a
Nazarene.
(Matthew 2.22,23)

And when they had performed all things according to the law of the
Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own CITY Nazareth. And the
child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the
grace of God was upon him.
(Luke 2.39,40)


The gospels do not tell us much about this 'city' - it has a
synagogue, it can scare up a hostile crowd (prompting JC's famous
"prophet rejected in his own land" quote), and it has a precipice -
but the city status of Nazareth is clearly established, at least
according to that source of nonsense called the Bible.

However when we look for historical confirmation of this hometown of a
god - surprise, surprise! - no other source confirms that the place
even existed in the 1st century AD.

· Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old
Testament. The Book of Joshua (19.10,16) - in what it claims is the
process of settlement by the tribe of Zebulon in the area - records
twelve towns and six villages and yet omits any 'Nazareth' from its
list.

· The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing
of Nazareth, nor does early rabbinic literature.

· St Paul knows nothing of 'Nazareth'. Rabbi Solly's epistles
(real and fake) mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all.

· No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is
first noted at the beginning of the 4th century.


None of this would matter of course if, rather like at the nearby
'pagan' city of Sepphoris, we could stroll through the ruins of 1st
century bath houses, villas, theatres etc. Yet no such ruins exist.

[...]

Excavations conducted by Father Bellarmino Bagatti (Professor, Studium
Biblicum Franciscanum at Flagellation, Jerusalem). Beneath his own
church and adjoining land, Bagatti discovered numerous caves and
hollows. Some of these caves have obviously had a great deal of use,
over many centuries. Most are tombs, many from the Bronze Age. Others
have been adapted for use as water cisterns, as vats for oil or as
'silos' for grain. Apparently, there were indications that Nazareth had
been 'refounded' in Hasmonean times after a long period when the area
had been deserted. Yet overwhelmingly, archaeological evidence from
before the second century is funerary. Obliged to admit a dearth of
suitable evidence of habitation, none the less, Bagatti was able
conclude that 1st century AD Nazareth had been 'a small agricultural
village settled by a few dozen families.'

With a great leap of faith the partisan diggers declared what they had
found was 'the village of Jesus, Mary & Joseph' - though they had not
found a village at all, and certainly no evidence of particular
individuals. The finds were consistent, in fact, with isolated
horticultural activity, close to a necropolis of long-usage.

Rather conveniently for the Catholic Church, questionable graffiti also
indicated that the shrine was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, no less!

Yet one point is inescapable: the Jewish disposition towards the
'uncleanliness' of the dead. The Jews, according to their customs,
would not build a village in the immediate vicinity of tombs and vice
versa. Tombs would have to be outside any village.

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article .com,
Jordan wrote:
...the existence of this planet does not
preclude the existence of other, more habitable planets in the Epsilon
Eridani system (though it _might_, if it migrated from far enough out
and swept up enough of the proto-planetary dust cloud in doing so)...

Yes and no and no and yes. :-)

The bad news is that a "hot Jupiter" almost certainly has to form fairly
far out, as a gas giant, beyond the habitable zone, and migrate inward
through the habitable zone. The migration is bad news for existing
planets there.

The good news is that some recent work indicates that a hot Jupiter
migrating inward can actually spawn Earth-sized planets in its wake, so to
speak. So the presence of a big close planet indeed *doesn't* preclude
smaller planets in the habitable zone, as many people thought.


Did you meant this?


http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=11909


'Hot Jupiter' Systems may Harbor Earth-like Planets


Final results of three planet formation simulations, compared to the
Solar system. The radius of the terrestrial planets scales as the cube
root of their mass, and the color represents their total water content
according to the scale shown. The habitable zone is drawn in grey, and
the short lines under the planets indicate the radial range of their
orbits. The positions of gas giants are given by the grey circles,
which are not to the same scale as the rocky planets.

The catalogue of confirmed extrasolar planets ('exoplanets') is growing
rapidly. There are currently approximately 133 known planetary systems,
harboring a total of 156 exoplanets as of January 2006*. With regard to
the search for life-sustaining worlds, however, the results have been
disappointing. Most of the exoplanets identified so far are so-called
"hot Jupiters", gas giants in a stable orbit very close to their star.
Stellar systems with a hot Jupiter were once thought to be incapable of
forming Earth-like planets, but suprising new evidence indicates
otherwise.

A planetary system begins its life as a disk of gas and dust
surrounding a newborn star. As dust particles rich in heavy elements
meet in their orbits, they can stick together and form larger, rocky
grains. Eventually the disk of gas gives rise to a swirling swarm of
'planetary embryos', rocky bodies a few hundred miles across. Far
from the stately ballet that we see in our own, mature solar system,
the embryos are constantly getting thrown into new orbits by close
encounters with their siblings.

Hot Jupiters are thought to form in the earliest stages of this
process, as the largest embryos begin to accumulate mass at a truly
impressive rate. One or more may grow into a full-fledged gas giant,
clearing the disk of all debris in a wide band around their orbit.
Nearby particles and embryos are either sucked into the giant, captured
as satellites (forming moons or rings), or flung into a new orbit.
Often these planets migrate towards their parent star as they form,
wreaking havoc in their wake. The disk is depleted of matter as they
slowly spiral inwards, so planetary embryos inside the giant's
original orbit would appear to have a low chance of survival.

Sean Raymond, at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics, doesn't agree. The gravitational
interactions involved can be modeled, and Jupiter-sized planets can
migrate to a close, stable orbit more quickly than one might think. If
a hot Jupiter settles into its final home while the planetary embryos
are forming, the inner disk might still contain enough gas and dust to
form terrestrial planets even after being thinned out by the gas
giant's passage.

Raymond has been collaborating with Tom Quinn (University of
Washington) and Jonathan Lunine (University of Arizona) on the problem
of planet formation in hot Jupiter systems. Their approach is to track
the evolution of these systems through N-body simulations of the
gravitational interactions between planetary embryos. In one set of
simulations, already published in the journal Icarus, 120 to 180
embryos are randomly distributed over a disk of radius 5 AU (roughly
the radius of our own Jupiter's orbit). A 'hot Jupiter' (placed at
a distance of 0.15, 0.25, or 0.5 AU from the star) forms the inner
limit of the simulated disk, and in some simulations a Jupiter-sized
planet is also placed at 5.2 AU. Because the particles are supposed to
represent a planetary disk depleted by the hot Jupiter's migration,
their total mass is actually rather low.

Each protoplanet is given an iron and water content according to its
distance from the star, with a significant water content only occurring
at distances greater than 2 AU (the "snow line", beyond which solid
ice can form in the disk). As the simulation progresses, gravitational
interactions between the protoplanets allow the orbits to evolve
naturally towards a final, stable state. On a close approach,
protoplanets can accrete in an inelastic collision.

After a hundred million years or so, the planetesimals been reduced to
a handful of Earth-like planets. Quite often, a planet with high water
content forms in the habitable zone of the star (the region with
surface temperatures that permit liquid water). If a gas giant forms
early and migrates quickly, rocky and even watery worlds could well
have formed in its aftermath.

One might argue that the effect of the gas giant's migration through
the disk might be even more disruptive than we think-who's to say
that it doesn't obliterate the disk entirely as it passes through? To
answer this question, Raymond is currently collaborating with Avi
Mandell and Steinn Sigurdsson (Penn State University) to improve the
simulations. Not only has the number of embryos grown to about a
thousand, but Raymond also follows their progress during a gas giant's
migration towards the star. As one might expect, most of the planetary
embryos are kicked into highly eccentric orbits by the gas giant as it
passes through. Despite this disruptive influence, quite a lot of dust
and gas is left over for planet formation. "As long as you include
the effects of gas drag to recircularize the [planetesimal] orbits,"
Raymond explains to PhysOrg.com, "you end up preserving about a third
of the starting mass."

They're getting some surprising results, too. They sometimes end up
with a planet several times more massive than the Earth in an orbit
very close to the star. According to Raymond, "In front of the giant
planet, material piles up and forms a large, rocky planet very quickly.
There isn't supposed to be that much mass within 0.1 AU of the star."
The detection of large, rocky planets in close orbits, where the disk
was too thin for them have accreted locally, would therefore be quite a
coup for the collaboration. In fact, just such a planet may have been
detected (albeit weakly) last year by a team of researchers using Keck
observatory's high-resolution spectrometer (Rivera et al., 2005).

Not only are hot Jupiters easily detected, their stellar systems would
appear to be promising targets in the search for terrestrial
exoplanets. In the future, Raymond plans to extend this technique to
the study of planet formation around low-mass stars and binary stars.

*http://exoplanets.org

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article .com,
Jordan wrote:
...the existence of this planet does not
preclude the existence of other, more habitable planets in the Epsilon
Eridani system (though it _might_, if it migrated from far enough out
and swept up enough of the proto-planetary dust cloud in doing so)...

Yes and no and no and yes. :-)

The bad news is that a "hot Jupiter" almost certainly has to form fairly
far out, as a gas giant, beyond the habitable zone, and migrate inward
through the habitable zone. The migration is bad news for existing
planets there.

The good news is that some recent work indicates that a hot Jupiter
migrating inward can actually spawn Earth-sized planets in its wake, so to
speak. So the presence of a big close planet indeed *doesn't* preclude
smaller planets in the habitable zone, as many people thought.

However, note that *this* big boy isn't a hot Jupiter -- its orbit is
quite elliptical. It sweeps *through* the habitable zone once per orbit.
You can pretty much forget about other planets there.


Here is older article that shows Earthlike life could be possible even
on eccentric planets


http://discover.com/issues/nov-02/features/featcircles/


Circles of Life



How far out of whack can the orbit of a planet like Earth get before we
all die?

By William Speed Weed
Illustrations by +ISM

DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 11 | November 2002


EARTH'S ORBIT (the red line above) is a near-perfect circle. But what
if the planet took a more eccentric path? Astronomer Darren Williams
has run computer simulations of various orbits. In one of the mildest,
the planet comes closer to the sun than Venus, then sails to the chilly
periphery of Mars. In the most extreme (the dark blue line), Earth
careens closer than Mercury, then flies nearly to the asteroid belt. In
every case, as the temperature averages show, the planet is habitable.

Earth is a Goldilocks kind of place: Not too hot, not too cold. Things
here are just right. We have a solid rock to stand on, liquid water to
sustain us, and an atmosphere to shield us from radiation. Our cozy
planet happens to lie just the right distance from the sun, in what
astronomers call the habitable zone. But that's not all. On a larger
scale, we live in a galaxy that is not too young, not too old. For a
few billion years after the Big Bang, there was nothing but hydrogen
and helium in the cosmos-nothing to make up terrestrial planets. It
took the first few generations of stars to forge heavier elements like
oxygen, iron, and uranium, which may power Earth's churning, molten
interior. By the time our sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, there was
plenty of planet-making material around. But the universe is aging, and
astronomers predict it will run out of radioactive uranium, potassium,
and thorium, and planets that form later will be as dead as the moon.

Within our just-right galaxy, we also live in a just-right spot,
about halfway out from the center-not too far in, not too far out. At
the core of the Milky Way, the stars are packed together so tightly
that they nearly collide with one another, and interstellar radiation
would make life-or at least complex life as we know it-impossible.
Out at the rim of the galaxy, there aren't enough stars to produce the
heavy elements needed for terrestrial planets. Out there, you might get
a rocky Mercury, about one-twentieth the size of Earth, but its gravity
would be too weak to hold on to an atmosphere.

Here in our solar system, in the just-right spot around a
just-right star, our Goldilocks planet runs laps around the sun in a
nearly perfect circular orbit, always staying 93 million miles from the
fire. For decades, astronomers assumed that an orbit like this was
essential to habitability. A planet that moved in an oval or ellipse
would swing too close to the sun at one end of its orbit and sail into
the chilly beyond at the other end. If elliptical orbits prohibit life,
it means that astronomers searching for Earth-like planets have fewer
candidates to choose from. It also means that Earth is vulnerable. If a
wandering star or a rogue black hole were to perturb the orbit of
Jupiter, deforming Earth's orbit in turn-an extremely unlikely event,
but astronomers estimate there are 10 million rogue black holes in the
Milky Way-all life on the planet would be destroyed.

Or maybe not. Astronomer Darren Williams and his colleagues at
Pennsylvania State University at Erie have been studying elliptical
orbits recently, and they think life on Earth can withstand a lot more
tumult than scientists previously guessed. They have been running
sophisticated computer models of planets in orbits of varying
eccentricity circling suns of various sizes. "High eccentricity does
not critically compromise planetary habitability," Williams says. Then
he drops the astrobiology lingo and translates with a boyish smile:
"These planets will still support life."

In the Zone

AT ANY SCALE, Earth sits squarely in the planetary comfort zone-the
narrow margin in space and time where the right kind of star can give
rise to the right kind of planet with the right conditions for life.
Most scientists agree that the following criteria apply to higher
life-forms. Single-celled organisms are extremely adaptable and may be
able to survive in harsher climes.


Local Zoning Laws

The habitable zone around a star is defined by the distance at which
water on a planet's surface can remain liquid. In our solar system, the
zone's inner limit is just outside the orbit of Venus; its outer edge
is near Mars. Whether the Red Planet is inside the zone is still a
matter of debate.


Galatic Zoning Laws

Near a galaxy's core and in its spiral arms, the stars are so dense
that they may give off too much radiation and cause too many
gravity-perturbing collisions to support life. Stars too far from the
center may contain too few metals to make planets massive enough to
hold on to an atmosphere. The sun sits right in between these extremes.



Universal Zoning Laws

At the very largest scale, life depends more on time than space. Right
after the Big Bang, only helium and hydrogen existed. It took 6 billion
years for the heavy elements to form that are needed for
life-supporting planets. Several billion years from now, some of those
elements-uranium 235, for instance-will begin to run out.

With his dimpled cheeks, handsome face, and wardrobe of quiet collared
shirts, Williams looks like a man who might draw his circles round. It
was his mentor, renowned geoscientist Jim Kasting, who first defined
the "habitable zone" in which planets could support life. The idea had
been floating around since the 1960s, but in the early 1990s, Kasting
used computer modeling to determine the zone's exact dimensions:
between 79 million and 140 million miles from a star (farther out for
hotter stars, closer in for cooler stars). Outside that narrow path,
Kasting argued, planets will overheat or freeze.

At the time, astronomers knew only of planets with fairly circular
orbits. But when the first extrasolar planets were discovered in 1995,
some of their orbits were highly elliptical. Williams decided to see
how life would fare in this unknown territory-and if his mentor's
formula would hold. He teamed up with Penn State colleague David
Pollard, a paleoclimatologist who has developed a respected computer
model he uses to study Earth's ancient climate. The model, known as
GENESIS2, is made up of 70,000 lines of computer code that mimic
Earth's atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, and a host of other factors,
including the shape of its orbit. To push Earth into an oval orbit, all
Pollard had to do was plug in a new number.

If an orbit is perfectly circular, in the model it is said to have
an eccentricity of 0; a straight line has an eccentricity of 1. Earth's
orbit is very close to the former-0.0167. Pollard and Williams
decided to stretch it toward the other extreme. They ran models for
eccentricities of 0.1, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.7. In each case, they kept the
average distance of the orbit the same: Earth still made one lap of the
sun in 365 days. They let each simulation run for 30 theoretical years
and then looked to see what Earth's climate was like in the brave new
orbits.

The least eccentric orbit-0.1-kept the planet inside the
habitable zone all year long; not surprisingly, there was barely any
change in climate. At higher eccentricities, though, things got
interesting. As astronomer Johannes Kepler explained in 1609, the more
elliptical a planet's path, the closer it gets to the sun at one end of
its orbit (known as perihelion), and the farther from the sun it goes
at the other end (known as aphelion). At an eccentricity of 0.3, the
planet's orbit would pass inside the orbital path of Venus at
perihelion and fly within 20 million miles of Mars at aphelion. In
Pollard's model, though, even when Earth drew closer to the sun than
Venus, it didn't develop a Venus-like climate. "Water has a very high
heat capacity," Williams says, "so the large amount of water on Earth
is slow to warm up." And the heat wouldn't last long. As Kepler also
explained, planets on eccentric orbits travel fastest at perihelion,
accelerating furiously. "Well before the oceans start boiling,"
Williams says, "the planet is racing away."
At the other end of an eccentric orbit, Earth slows down again. But
here the climate model takes a strange and welcome turn. The planet
absorbs so much heat during its brief trip a around the sun, Williams
explains, that its coldest months out by Mars are still warmer than
winter months on a circular orbit: The average global temperature is 73
degrees Fahrenheit, versus 58 degrees on Earth now. It's not a
perfectly regulated system: Some parts of the African, South American,
and Australian interiors heat up to 140 degrees at perihelion. But the
extreme temperatures only last a month or two. Erie, Pennsylvania,
where Williams lives with his wife and two children, is nearly as
temperate and cozy in a 0.3 orbit as it is on a circular one. On a 0.4
orbit, the annual mean temperature jumps to 86 degrees, and larger
landmasses become insufferably hot. But again, Williams says, "This is
a habitable planet."



Heavy Eccentricity

On Earth's familiar, circular orbit, the seasons are determined by the
planet's tilted axis. When the Northern Hemisphere leans toward the
sun, it's summer there; when it leans away, it's winter. On an
eccentric orbit, the distance to the sun makes all the difference. The
maps below show how temperatures would vary worldwide, over the course
of a year, if Earth's orbit had a mild eccentricity of 0.3 (top) or a
high eccentricity of 0.7 (bottom). Note how temperatures rise and fall
much more dramatically on land than on sea. The oceans act as giant
planetary temperature regulators: They absorb massive amounts of heat
at the solar end of the orbit, then slowly release it as the planet
swings into frigid space. On the mildly eccentric orbit, the planet
passes closest to the sun in February, but the oceans continue to
absorb heat in the weeks that follow. The hottest months are March and
April, when temperatures in Africa rise above 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Winter temperatures reach their lowest point in August and September,
when the planet swings out toward Mars. Yet even the Arctic never cools
down below 32 degrees, because the oceans are still releasing their
pent-up heat. On a highly eccentric orbit, the distances and
temperature swings are far more extreme. Here the planet comes closest
to the sun in early March, bringing continental temperatures near the
equator all the way to the boiling point. That heat, retained by the
oceans and atmosphere, keeps much of the planet sweltering until it's
hurtling out toward the asteroid belt. The Arctic Ocean would melt in
this scenario, offering prime beachfront real estate.

The final simulation showed just how far the boundaries of life can be
pushed. This time, Williams threw the planet into an orbit with an
eccentricity of 0.7, sending it closer to the sun than Mercury at its
perihelion and well beyond Mars at its aphelion. In all, it would spend
only 75 days of the year in the habitable zone. Could such a world be
habitable?

Well, yes, but only if you cheat a little. Before they ran the
simulation, Pollard and Williams reduced the sun's luminosity by 29
percent. They knew, by then, that planets with eccentric orbits get
hotter than planets with circular orbits, even if their average
distance from the sun is the same. Widening the eccentric orbit would
have made the planet more habitable, but the GENESIS2 model has a
365-day year hardwired into it. So the researchers took another tack:
They dimmed the sun just enough so that the overall heat the planet
received would be the same as for our Earth. Any changes in climate
could then be attributed to the highly eccentric orbit.

Even with a dimmer sun, life on a 0.7 orbit isn't exactly what we
would call comfortable. In Erie, Pennsylvania, summer temperatures
spike to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun looks twice as large in
the sky. It doesn't rain for months, and the evaporation rate is so
high that Lake Erie dries up altogether. Six months later, in the
chilly winter beyond the orbit of Mars, the sun shrinks to half its
usual size in the sky. The oceans have stored up so much heat during
the summer that temperatures still stay mostly above freezing. "It
never snows in Erie, Pennsylvania-something people around here would
be thrilled about," Williams says. "But we'd have to migrate with those
summer temperatures so high."

Most likely, we wouldn't come back. In a 0.7 orbit, the Arctic
Ocean melts, Pollard says, "and anywhere on its shores-Norway for
instance-wouldn't be such a bad place to live." By contrast, central
Africa in the summer is a stovetop with temperatures near boiling-if
there were any water to boil. Higher life forms probably could not live
there, Williams says. But microbes have been shown to withstand
temperatures of 230 degrees, and nowhere on this vastly changed Earth
does it get that hot. The oceans get hotter, but not so hot that they
boil away. Life is certainly different on this Earth-but it's still
life.

"The bottom line is that this planet is habitable," Williams says,
beaming. Even his mentor, Kasting, agrees: "Planetary habitability is
not that hard to achieve." Tinker with the planet a bit, and the
possibilities for life get even better. A bigger ocean, for instance,
or a thick, insulating atmosphere like Venus's, would help smooth out
the temperature extremes on eccentric orbits.

We may already have such rocks in our sights. In the past seven
years, more than 100 extrasolar planets have been detected through a
method known as radial velocity. Astronomers can't actually see these
planets, only a telltale wobble in the stars that the planets are
orbiting. But the amplitude and timing of the wobble can reveal a
planet's size as well as the shape of its orbit. One star, 16 Cygni B,
has a planet with an eccentric orbit of 0.67; another star, HD222582,
has a planet with an orbit of 0.71. Both these stars are brighter than
our sun, but their planets have a wider orbit than Earth, so they pass
straight through the habitable zone. The planets are gas giants like
Jupiter and thus less likely to harbor life. But according to
Williams's climate calculations, if they have large rocky moons, those
moons could be habitable.

Here Kasting sounds a note of caution: "It's going to be very hard
to detect those moons if they exist," he says, and the total population
of planets in eccentric orbits may be small. Solar systems with
elliptical orbits tend to be less stable than systems with circular
orbits: Their planets can cross one another's path and bang into each
other.

When astronomers get better at detecting planets, Kasting suspects,
they will find a host of Earths out there, running circular orbits
inside his habitable zone. Still, he says, Williams's work is "one more
reason to be optimistic" that we can find another Earth-even if it is
a bit more eccentric.

In article . com,
wrote:
The good news is that some recent work indicates that a hot Jupiter
migrating inward can actually spawn Earth-sized planets in its wake, so to
speak. So the presence of a big close planet indeed *doesn't* preclude
smaller planets in the habitable zone, as many people thought.

Did you meant this?
http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=11909

Actually, I meant Raymond et al, "Exotic Earths: Forming Habitable Worlds
with Giant Planet Migration", Science 313 (8 Sept 2006) p. 1413. However,
that URL looks like a slightly earlier report about the same work that
produced that paper.
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