Jupiter is the King of the Solar System but exoplanet surveys have revealed that it's an unusual type of world. Just ~10% of Sun-like stars have planets of the same mass and orbit as Jupiter. So could the existence of Jupiter be somehow beneficial to emergence of complex life, like us, on other planets in the system? On the hand, maybe Jupiter's strong gravity should scatter asteroids towards us, perhaps making things worse? Dr Elisa Quintana from NASA Goddard dropped in to the Cool Worlds Lab and explained her research trying to resolve the mystery of Jupiter's role: friend or foe?
::More about this Video::
► Quintana et al. (2016), "The Frequency of Giant Impacts on Earth-like Worlds": https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03663
► Johnson et al. (2010), "Giant Planet Occurrence in the Stellar Mass-Metallicity Plane": https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.3084
► Cool Worlds Lab website: http://coolworlds.astro.columbia.edu
► Columbia University Department of Astronomy: http://www.astro.columbia.edu
► Outro music by Daft Punk "Harder, Better, Stronger, Faster": http://www.daftpunk.com and http://smarturl.it/DaftPunkiTunes
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