Will Kepler Find Habitable Moons?
source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903064925.htm
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- DeliaTheArtist
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"Since the launch of the NASA Kepler Mission earlier this year, astronomers have been keenly awaiting the first detection of an Earth-like planet around another star. Now, in an echo of science fiction movies a team of scientists led by Dr David Kipping of University College London thinks that they may even find habitable ‘exomoons,’ too.
Kepler’s primary mission is to monitor thousands of stars looking for characteristic dips in their brightness as orbiting planets pass in front of them in so-called ‘transit’ events. The orbiting observatory should be able to time these transits to an extremely high accuracy.
The scientists considered a wide range of possible planetary systems and found that a fluffy Saturn-like planet (the ringed world is extremely low in mass for its size) gives the best possible chance for detecting a moon, rather than a denser Jupiter-like world. This is because planets like Saturn are large – blocking out a lot of light as they pass in front of their star – but very light, meaning they will wobble much more than a heavy planet.
If the Saturn-like planet is at the right distance from its star, then the temperature will allow liquid water to be stable on any sufficiently large moons in orbit around it and these could then be habitable.
Dr Kipping says, "For the first time, we have demonstrated that potentially habitable moons up to hundreds of light years away may be detected with current instrumentation"
‘As we ran the simulations, even we were surprised that moons as small as one-fifth of the Earth's mass could be spotted.
‘It seems probable that many thousands, possibly millions, of habitable exomoons exist in the Galaxy and now we can start to look for them."
Kepler’s primary mission is to monitor thousands of stars looking for characteristic dips in their brightness as orbiting planets pass in front of them in so-called ‘transit’ events. The orbiting observatory should be able to time these transits to an extremely high accuracy.
The scientists considered a wide range of possible planetary systems and found that a fluffy Saturn-like planet (the ringed world is extremely low in mass for its size) gives the best possible chance for detecting a moon, rather than a denser Jupiter-like world. This is because planets like Saturn are large – blocking out a lot of light as they pass in front of their star – but very light, meaning they will wobble much more than a heavy planet.
If the Saturn-like planet is at the right distance from its star, then the temperature will allow liquid water to be stable on any sufficiently large moons in orbit around it and these could then be habitable.
Dr Kipping says, "For the first time, we have demonstrated that potentially habitable moons up to hundreds of light years away may be detected with current instrumentation"
‘As we ran the simulations, even we were surprised that moons as small as one-fifth of the Earth's mass could be spotted.
‘It seems probable that many thousands, possibly millions, of habitable exomoons exist in the Galaxy and now we can start to look for them."
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