A recent publication was just released by researchers with the Universities of Arizona and Washington and in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society shows that planets outside the solar system with a nearby companion are more likely to host for different forms of life compared to those floating in space all by themselves.

According to previous investigations, planets tend to cool as they age. Specifically, their molten cores turn into solids, and heat-generation is reduced up to the point when the planets can no longer sustain life, as Science Daily informs.

This is because one such companion is meant to exert a gravitational pull strong enough to result in tidal heating when in conjunction with the influence of a nearby star, and keep planets outside the solar system warm and vague enough to be able to sustain life.

In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, specialists explain that companion planets help keep others in their proximity stay habitable by causing them to have a noncircular orbit, such as to continuously move closer and farther from their host star.

It is this exact variation in how close a planet gets to come to a star while busy orbiting it that encourages habitability by triggering regular changes in the planet's shape and birthing frictional heating, the scientists behind this research project argue.

Collected evidence with the help of computer models shows that such frictional heating could also affect planets orbiting stars about one-quarter the mass of our Sun. Such planets could therefore host life, Rory Barnes and fellow researchers argue.

The University of Washington specialist concludes that even if they do not host life forms to begin with, such planets might be just right for us to inhabit at some point. “Perhaps in the distant future, after our sun has died out, our descendants will live on worlds like these,” the researcher says.