Recent research indicates that habitable planets are lurking in the trail of planets like Jupiter, orbiting distant stars.
When a gas giant is reborn from a nebula of gas and dust around a young star, the planet's gravity forms a trail in front of and behind it, concentrating enough matter to form small, rocky planets like Earth. Such conclusions were made based on the results of a computer simulation of Vladimir Lear from the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in Sweden. The object, which appeared in the trail of Jupiter, could have formed the planet Saturn, which subsequently moved to its present position under the influence of the gravity of other planets, the team of researchers explains.
Outside of our solar system, some gas planets have been found in the habitable zone of their stars. Their footprints can harbor rocky worlds the size of our Earth. Scientists support this possibility. They believe that such planets can be detected by the small gravitational impulses they send to their larger relatives, this idea is supported by recent calculations by Niku Madusudan and Joshua Wynn, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).