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Think “moon” and you probably envision a desolate, cratered landscape, maybe with an American flag and some old astronaut footprints. Earth’s moon is no place for living things. But that isn’t necessarily true for every moon. Whirling around Saturn, Enceladus spits out geysers of water from an underground ocean. Around Jupiter, Europa has a salty, subsurface sea and Titan has lakes of ethane and methane. A handful of the roughly 150 moons in the solar system have atmospheres, organic compounds, ice, and maybe even liquid water. They all seem like places where something could live—albeit something weird.
So now that the Kepler space telescope has found more than 1,000 planets—data that suggest the Milky Way galaxy could contain a hundred billion worlds—it makes sense to some alien-hunters to concentrate not on them but on their moons. The odds for life on these so-called exoplanets look a lot better—multiply that hundred billion by 150 and you get a lot of places to look for ET. “Because there are so many more moons than planets, if life can get started on moons, then that’s going to be a lot of lively moons,” says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute.
Even better, more of those moons might be in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist. That’s one reason Harvard astronomer David Kipping got interested in exomoons.
So far, no one has found a moon outside the solar system yet. But people like Kipping are looking hard. He leads a project called the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler, the only survey project dedicated to finding moons in other planetary systems. The team has looked at 55 systems, and this year they plan to add 300 more. “It’s going to be a very big year for us,” Kipper says.
Finding moons isn’t easy. Kepler was designed to find planets—the telescope watches for dips in starlight when a planet passes in front of its star. But if a moon accompanies that planet, it could further lessen that starlight, called a light curve. A moon’s gravitational tug also causes the planet to wobble, a subtle motion that scientists can measure.
In their search, Kipping’s team sifts through more than 4,000 potential planets in Kepler’s database, identifying 400 that have the best chances of hosting a detectable moon. They then use a supercomputer to simulate how a hypothetical moon of every possible size and orientation would orbit each of the 400 planets. The computer simulations produce hypothetical light curves that the astronomers can then compare to the real Kepler data. The real question, Kipping says, isn’t whether moons exist—he’s pretty sure they do—but how big they are. If the galaxy is filled with big moons about the same size as Earth or larger, then the researchers might find a dozen such moons in the Kepler data. But if it turns out that the universe doesn’t make moons that big, and they’re as small as the moons in our solar system, then the chances of detecting a moon drop.
According to astronomer Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the latter case may be more likely. “My gut feeling is that because the moon formation process seems so robust in our solar system, I would expect a similar thing is going on in an exoplanetary system,” he says. Which means it’ll be tough for Kipping’s team to find anything, even though they’re getting better at detecting the teeny ones—in one case, down to slightly less than twice the mass of the solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede.
originally posted by: blacktie
a reply to: Krazysh0t
well I believe space travel is possible and some people have been other places and lived to tell about it online
why, do you believe all planets and moons are empty void of anything human-like ?
originally posted by: blacktie
a reply to: Krazysh0t
well I believe space travel is possible and some people have been other places and lived to tell about it online
?
originally posted by: blacktie
a reply to: Krazysh0t
well I believe space travel is possible and some people have been other places and lived to tell about it online
why, do you believe all planets and moons are empty void of anything human-like ?
originally posted by: jefwane
Could one of the super Jupiters we've found support an earth sized moon?
If it could is there any chance it could orbit it's planet far enough away to avoid being tidally locked.
I understand a planet being tidally locked doesn't necessarily preclude life, but i doubt a tidally locked planet would have the same diversity of life that a planet like earth would have.
originally posted by: jefwane
I understand a planet being tidally locked doesn't necessarily preclude life, but i doubt a tidally locked planet would have the same diversity of life that a planet like earth would have.
originally posted by: JadeStar
It might actually be more diverse as there would be isolated biomes where creatures might not venture far from if they were well adapted. The night side vs the day side vs the terminator might all be like separate worlds.
originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People
a reply to: SpaceOverlord
Fine. Just as Krazysh0t said, other life in the solar system is certainly possible. However, it isn't a "given".
When something is a "given" then you are saying it is virtually a 100% probability of being true. I agree with you, Krazysh0t, and blacktie in as much as I also think other life in the solar system is certainly possible. But I also agree with Krazysh0t that it is not a "given".
Even though I'm not a scientist, I like to try to think like one, and a good scientist would not jump to a conclusion like that (i.e., saying that there is definitely life) until they find solid evidence of specific life someplace.
Sure -- there is plenty of good evidence that there are places in the solar system that may support life (Enceladus, Titan, Europa, Ganymede, the sub-surface of Mars, the clouds of Venus, etc.), but that is not the same as finding specific solid evidence of specific life someplace.
Personally, I believe there probably is other life in the solar system. However, I'm not ready to say that there definitely is life until I see specific evidence of that life in its specific environment.
Where do you get the idea that it is a "given" that we aren't alone in the solar system? The number of bodies in our solar system that can support life are ridiculously low. Sure we MIGHT not be alone in the solar system, but it is no where near a GIVEN that we aren't.