The hunt is on for habitable moons

• Autores: Jacob Aron
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3013, 2015, pág. 12
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The galaxy could be stuffed with large moons that orbit alien worlds, according to an analysis of data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. Such moons are thought to be the most likely places to find alien life, so groups are clamouring to find the first. Astronomers have raked in thousands of exoplanets, but their smaller moons have proved harder to come by. Kepler looks for exoplanets by watching how the light from a star dips as a planet passes In front, known as a transit. Moons should produce a smaller secondary dip, but that dip's timing varies because an orbiting moon can transit before, after or at the same time as its parent planet. A team led by David Kipping at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is searching for exomoons by modelling all the positions one could be in and looking for similar light signals in the Kepler data.