Extrasolar trojan planets close to habitable zones

Abstract

We investigate the stability regions of hypothetical terrestrial planets around the Lagrangian equilibrium points L4 and L5 in some specific extrasolar planetary systems. The problem of their stability can be treated in the framework of the restricted three body problem where the host star and a massive Jupiter-like planet are the primary bodies and the terrestrial planet is regarded as being massless. From these theoretical investigations one cannot determine the extension of the stable zones around the equilibrium points. Using numerical experiments we determined their largeness for three test systems chosen from the table of the know extrasolar planets, where a giant planet is moving close to the so-called habitable zone around the host star in low eccentric orbits. The results show the dependence of the size and structure of this region, which shrinks significantly with the eccentricity of the known gas giant.