51 Pegasi and Bellerophon. In the picture Bellerophon is in the foreground, otherwise it would be much to big. (Graphic: NASA)

Among the increasing number of extrasolar planets one can not find Earth-sized planets yet. This may be the consequence of the observing technique based on the Doppler shift of the hosting star's spectral lines. Although the permanent improvement of this technique makes possible now the discovery of even 8 Earth-mass planets, there have been much efforts for designing space missions aiming at the detection of terrestrial exoplanets in the near future (COROT, Kepler Mission, TPF, Darwin).

The detection and investigation of Earth-like exoplanets has a great importance for further improvements of formation theories of planetary system, explaining how rocky Earth-like and gaseous Jupiter-like planets had been formed simultaneously. Another major question which has a special interest not only for the scientific community is whether life may have evolved in some exoplanetary systems.

The aim of these stability maps (refered in the followings as Exocatalogue) is to help the reader in deciding where there Earth-like planets could exist in exoplanetary systems. By using these stability maps the dynamical properties of the habitable zone of an exoplanetary system can also be studied.

This version of the Exocatalogue contains stability maps which are computed when only one giant planet is known in the system. Since the number of extrasolar systems containing two or more giant planets is increasing, this Exocatalogue will be updated in the near future.

With this Exocatalogue we intend to provide a homogeneous and detailed database containing the stability properties of hypothetical terrestrial extrasolar planets.

A detailed description of the Exocatalogue can be found in the following research paper:

Sándor, Zs., Süli, A., Érdi, B., Pilat-Lohinger, E. and Dvorak, R.: "A Stability Catalogue of the Habitable zones in Extrasolar Planetary Systems", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), 2006

Anyone benefiting scientifically this cataloge is kindly asked to cite the above paper.