Detecting Life-Friendly Moons

Description

Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts traipsed across our Moon, making it "inhabited" for the first time – albeit for only two and half hours. A bona-fide habitable moon has never been found, but astronomers are considering how we might find one around distant stars.

"I think exomoons are just as interesting as exoplanets," says David Kipping of University College London.

In our own solar system, moons are becoming the main targets of future space missions . But when we look beyond our local conclave, it is only the exoplanets that astronomers have so far been able to detect.

Kipping says this situation may be changing. He and his colleagues have developed a new method to search for exomoons which takes advantage of current technology – specifically the recently launched Kepler spacecraft .

The team's calculations – which appear in the September issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society – show that NASA's Kepler could detect a moon in the habitable region (where liquid water could exist) around a star within about 500 light-years of our Sun.

When the moon hits your eye

Our solar system has eight planets (sorry, Pluto ), and 170 moons, according to the Planetary Society. Of course, many of these moons are cold, lifeless rocks, but some scientists consider Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus as possible havens for some sort of biology.

Other stellar systems may have similar numbers of planets and moons, and some fraction of these will be at the right distance from their star to have liquid water.

"There may be just as many habitable moons as habitable planets in our galaxy," Kipping says.

Astronomers have previously considered how one might detect a far-off moon, but many of these techniques require a lucky alignment of star, planet and ...

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