Kepler Mission Could Detect Exomoons 64
Lord Northern writes "According to several news sources, NASA's Kepler mission is said to be able to detect habitable moons orbiting planets in other star systems. Kepler is a space telescope designed to detect exoplanets. Its mission will have it orbiting the Sun for 3.5 years, after which we'll be able to tell if any of our neighboring stars actually have planetary systems around them. However, apparently we will be able to detect not only exoplanets, but also exomoons orbiting those exoplanets. The Kepler team came to that conclusion after running a computer simulation which found that the telescope was sensitive enough to detect the gravitational pull of an orbiting moon (PDF). This means that the data expected by the end of the mission is going to be very rich, and it is said that moons as small as 0.2 times the mass of earth could be detected. Further details about the Kepler mission are available from NASA."
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by that logic a habitable zone is a complete farce as well considering that not all places in the habitable zone are habitable. [eg. Earth's moon]
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It was on July 20th, 1969.
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It was certainly a lot more hospitable than the "surface" of Jupiter, or even more realistically, the surface of Titan or Io. Neither of those two places are something I'd like to visit, even if the vistas are stunning.
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exactly. referring to the Earth's moon as habitable is dishonest.
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any given point in earths orbit is completely inhabitable for most of the year as well. The only exception is when the earth is there. Earths moon lacks the mass to contain an atmosphere at its temperature.
A planet like jupiter or larger (as many such large planets have been found) in the "green" zone around a planet could easily have an earth sized moon orbiting it. That is what they are talking about when they mention habitable moons.
Re:article is retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think their use of it is wrong. The title is "On the detectability of habitable exomoons", and the abstract clarifies that to detect "habitable exomoons", this research proposes to detect "habitable-zone exomoons" (that phrase with the -zone qualification appears 4 times in the abstract), because presumably the actually habitable moons will be some subset of those.
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The problem with defining a habitable zone is that currently we have a sample size of one. That makes statistical analysis of the topic difficult to do on an extreme level.
Assuming that the sample size can be increased, perhaps more statistical confidence can be gained to gain a proper conclusion. Discovery of life on Mars or Europa, to give some examples, might at least open up some potential and allow finer gradients of classification for "habitable" as well.
Even those two worlds being added as a "maybe
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Or is it just that it never existed? (For certain values.) ^^
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Distinctions are only meaningful if they clarify or help avoid confusion. In what way is "habitable moon" confusing at all? Certainly your first wording is more precise, but "habitable moon" loses nothing truly meaningful in translation.
That's no moon (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, according to the lightcurve measured by Kepler, it is one. My bad.
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Presumably the Death Star is habitable (or was until the Rebel alliance destroyed it.)
Whether it would show up as habitable is a different matter, the livable part is internal so surface temperature, atmosphere etc won't show up from a distance.
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I don't think that the Death Star was ever designed to operate in "stealth" mode. If anything, it was intended to be a shining beacon to the planets of the galaxy, letting them know that if they rebelled, that the Emperor certainly could dispatch them post-haste in a gruesome manner.
In other words, physical properties would be plainly obvious from even astronomical distances that you are dealing with the Death Star.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how something that big can travel at superluminal ve
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... that's no moon
If Kepler says it's a moon, it's a moon. I find your lack of faith disturbing...
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If Kepler says it's a moon, it's a moon.
Now now. My 8th Grade English teacher (back in 1981/82) has no say in the determination of what is and is not a moon. However, Mr. Morrison, my 8th Grade science teacher (and one of the absolute coolest teachers I ever had way back then) could be more of an authority in such matters.
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Is it possible that the mods don't understand the reference?
I feel a great disturbance in the force.
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This puts the larger moons of the solar system, Ganymede, Titan, "The Moon" (Earth), and Triton somewhere on the border of detection... if we were trying to scan our own sun from that distance. Finding another terrestrial-sized double planet like the Earth-Moon planetary system would be a remarkable find in a situation like this.
Pluto, on the other hand, would not be detected based on mass alone.
Big moon (Score:1, Insightful)
Given that Mars weighs only 10% of Earth, a 0.2 Earth-mass moon is large indeed.
its a shame (Score:2, Interesting)
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Id kill to go to space
Would you? ... we might be able to make an arrangement here.
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Humans have evolved over quite a long while to fit onto this rock and its environment, the chance that you will find a better one are pretty much zero.
Space is for most part just empty room that will try to kill you and non-earth planets aren't really much better.
Re:its a shame (Score:4, Insightful)
No not zero at all. Nowhere near zero in fact. Chance is probability, and the probability is defined by the number of planets, which mathematically works out to "quite a lot". The chances of YOU finding a habitable planet are of course zero because you are not even interested in looking. So far we have a sample size of 8 (9 if you still appreciate Pluto), so to say there is no chance is premature. Not to mention of course the way we evolved to fly at 35000 feet at -50 C at twice the speed of sound.
Space does not "try" to do anything. Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun. How many "non-earth" planets do you know of ? How many of them have tried to kill you ? When you last crossed the road, how many cars "tried to kill you" ? What did you do to mitigate this risk ? Or did you see it as inescapable fate and stick to your original side of the road ? ...
Oceans for the most part are just empty space with storms that try to kill you, and any non-european continents aren't really much better either. Oh wait
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Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun.
And when you run out of air you have to return back to where you came from... thats not quite good enough when you want to have a self sustaining outer space colony, as returning back to earth and refueling resources just isn't an option when its a 5 light year trip.
The earth ecosystem doesn't work so well for it by random chance, but because we are an evolved part of it. Chances of finding a compatible one are pretty slim.
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Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun.
And when you run out of air you have to return back to where you came from... thats not quite good enough when you want to have a self sustaining outer space colony, as returning back to earth and refueling resources just isn't an option when its a 5 light year trip.
The earth ecosystem doesn't work so well for it by random chance, but because we are an evolved part of it. Chances of finding a compatible one are pretty slim.
Why? Are organic chemical unique to just the Earth? Are hydrogen and oxygen only found combined in the oceans of the Earth? Now that would be a remarkable scientific discovery if it were to be true.
Finding a place where organic chemistry can function like it does here on the Earth, however, might be a huge accomplishment. I would certainly say that such a place would be quite rare.
Only if time is no object... (Score:2)
No not zero at all. Nowhere near zero in fact. Chance is probability, and the probability is defined by the number of planets, which mathematically works out to "quite a lot".
Only if you ignore reasonable sub-light travel times. If you don't, it becomes "very, very few" instead. This comes up with the SETI project when you consider the number of starts with in a mere 100 light-years of us. There are only 511 G stars (those like our sun) in that distance and if you narrow the volume to a 50 ly radius, there are only 63 G stars. Within 20 ly, you can count the number on one hand -- 4.
(Note: We don't have any known, non-speculative technology that could get us above 0.1c, so I
Re:its a shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, we evolved to fit into the savannas of Africa pretty well, everything after that has been colonization. Theres been some small scale evolution to adapt to new environments, but all of that was after we moved to the new areas, relying on the primary tool evolution gave us: intelligence.
If colonization of other worlds is possible, then its worthwhile. Not because we want to find a better Earth, but because we want to find more Earths. It may very well be that we adapt those worlds to suit us as those worlds adapt the settlers. However, its our adaptability through intelligence that will get us there, and that makes more and more environments suitable for us. The colonizers have never had it easy, but they have a history of adapting and making it better for following generations.
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The fossil record doesn't agree with you. The Earth has had several dominant species and has killed them all after a time. If we don't escape the Earth that's our fate. Regardless, this is an IT geek site and anybody posting here should know the value of offsite backups.
Your failure modes omit a number of sufficient extinction level events to wipe out mankind. There are after all the inevitable glaciation, runaway greenhouse, Solar variation, Megavolcanos, cometary impactor, exosolar impactor, global ther
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If you are 27, then you must have heard about Eric Drexler and Molecular Nanotechnology. Indeed Eric's master's thesis at MIT was on the subject of solar sails and Eric wrote a number of papers [1] about how MNT would enable inexpensive space access.
If you really wanted to go to space you might consider spending less time on wishful thinking and more time on constructive activities. If you were to use the existing (free) Nanoengineer-1 molecular design software to design the nanoscale parts which are elem
Re:Obligatory moderation (Score:1, Redundant)
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Exomorons? (Score:1, Funny)
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Actually, habitable is a reletive term (Score:1)
Correction for the summary (Score:5, Informative)
The summary makes one error, suggesting that Kepler is capable of detecting the gravitational 'wobble' caused by a moon. Rather, Kepler, or any system of similar sensitivity, is able to detect the transit of a moon, and recognize it as being distinct from that of the parent planet.
Understandable mistake, since all of the early exo-planet detections were made using the 'wobble' method (detecting the Doppler shift corresponding with a stars motion due to a heavy, close planet). However, the transit method, which measures small dips in the brightness as the planet passes in front of its parent star is far more sensitive, though more difficult to use due to noise constraints.
Basically, imagine if you were looking at our sun from another star system, and Jupiter stood out clearly as a dip in the light curve, reappearing every 8 or 9 years(?). With this, something like Io or Europa would show up as a smaller periodic variation overlaid on that larger dip. Only noise levels are standing in the way of detecting it, and apparently they think Kepler can handle it.
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Well, no. It says they can detect exomoons with mass > 0.2 Earth masses. Since even Ganymede is only 0.025 Earth mass
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Sorry but you are wrong. Kepler is not able to detect the transit of a moon, it is able to detect the delay in the transit of a planet due to the pull of a moon on that planet.
So it is true that it can "detect the gravitational pull of an orbiting moon", not just using the 'wobble' method as you assume the summary assumed.
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