The Hunt Is on for Habitable Moons Around Alien Planets

While astronomers continue to search for potentially habitable alien planets, they're expanding the hunt to include moons that could host life as well.

Three new computer simulations may help researchers identify rocky satellites beyond our solar system that could harbor water on their surfaces, if their parent planets circle close enough to their stars.

According to David Kipping, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a good-size rocky moon at the right distance from its star "ticks all the boxes for our wish list of habitable conditions."

In search of a habitable alien moon

According to Tusnski, the French space mission Convection Rotation and Planetary Transits (CoRoT) should be able to detect an exomoon with a radius 1.3 times as large as Earth, while Kepler would be able to spot a moon a third the size of our planet.

"Once the moon is clearly detected, its basic properties, such as its size, can be determined as precisely as the stand-alone planets with similar sizes," Pál said.

But in order to calculate the properties, such a moon must first be found.

"The real question is if they exist," said Kipping.

www.space.com...




Are they finally warming up to the idea that moons may be habitable too? Amazing.

One potential problem I can imagine for long term habitability is if the gravity of a habitable moon is too low. It is unclear just how the human body would react to living on such a place, but at the very least it would be very, very hard for them to go back to living on a near 1g planet. And i'm not sure on this, but don't some moons orbit through the radiation belts of gas giants? If there isn't a geomagnetic field on a moon and it regularly passes through those it'd be a tough time living there.

Forgive me for becoming crabby and cynical, but so what if we find a dozen of them? We've cut our space budget to nearly nothing, a Mars landing is nearly laughable, it seems that we've lost the heart for space.

Please tell me otherwise, but I think the budget bureaucrats have cut the heart out of the American spirit, and made us dull earth-bound clods.

reply to post by charles1952


It wouldn't really matter in this century how many we found. We won't be sending manned missions past the Oort cloud for many, many years

Many members on this website post the most fantastical claims about UFO visitation, aliens, Greys, Nordics, federations of light beings, etc.

But the more interesting truth is that real scientists here on Earth are getting close to finding evidence for extraterrestrial life. Just last year in 2011 we discoverd hundreds of new exoplanets orbiting distant stars. That brings estimates of the total number of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy to 50 Billion.

aftercontact.org...

Now in the OP we learn that scientists are close to being able to detect moons orbiting alien worlds of distant star systems. Truly an amazing time to be alive, and remarkable that we could have scientific verification of ET life within the next decade.

reply to post by kristobal


My questions revolving around ET life aren't about "do they exist?" but more along the lines of "how frequently do earth-like planets occur". I am very excited to be living in a period where that variable of Drake's Equation is close to being filled in

reply to post by LonelyGuy


I will believe it when they announce they have found a small forest moon circling the far off planet of Endor, and also have found something artifical and metalic possibly orbiting the moon.

These announcements are all well and good,but please....they know full well life exists out there.A team of people are employed to remove Alien objects/craft from photos.

A scientist has even mentioned microscopic life was proved to be found on Mars in the 1970s.This is just another painfully slow move to climatise people to Life out there.