FORBES - Massive planets like Jupiter—now at its brightest and best in the night sky—can prevent Earth-sized planets from becoming Earth-like by upsetting their orbits and destroying climates.
In other star systems, gas giants can play a much more destructive role. As an example, the authors studied HD 141399, a star system also with four gas giant planets, which is 121 light-years from the solar system in the constellation Boötes. They did computer simulations to see if the four gas giant planets ejected any planets out of the star's habitable zone.
HD 141399 is a chaotic place with "four Jupiters acting like wrecking balls, throwing everything out of whack," said Stephen Kane, first author of the paper and an astrophysicist at the University of California – Riverside. Earth would be unlikely to stay where it is if it was in this system, the simulations showed. "There are only a select few areas where the giants' gravitational pull would not knock a rocky planet out of its orbit and send it flying right out of the zone," said Kane.