Science Daily: Will Kepler Find Habitable Moons?
ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2009) — 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.
The new results will appear in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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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."
Consider Earthlike planets circling gas giants. Imagine the goofball religions those folks must have. They look up from their tide-locked little world and see such a magnificent sight. Oh, the schisms that would form when one half of them declared "it's just another world like ours," only to have the other half declare them heretics.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if any of them make it past the atomic age?