Exomoons are extrasolar satellites, meaning they are orbiting other planets found far outside of our solar system. And these exomoons could offer an important clue about where alien life might be found. Scientists are becoming increasingly successful at finding exoplanets.
4,000 and counting have been found, with researchers reportedly shocked at how common they are.
Some of those planets, however, will have moons and a minority of these may possess the correct conditions for liquid water and therefore alien life.
Dr Phil Sutton from the University of Lincoln said: “These moons can be internally heated by the gravitational pull of the planet they orbit, which can lead to them having liquid water well outside the normal narrow habitable zone for planets that we are currently trying to find Earth-like planets in.
“I believe that if we can find them, moons offer a more promising avenue to finding extra-terrestrial life.”
Scientists are now racing to search for more exomoons, in an attempt to understand how well they might serve as a home for life.
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However achieving this is hard work because the moons are so small and distant from Earth.
To overcome that, Dr Sutton used computer simulations to model the rings around an exoplanet dubbed J1407b.
Those rings are 200 times larger than the Saturn’s and researchers checked to see whether the gaps in them were the result of moons.
The research failed to show that the scattered particles around the edge of the ring were not likely to have been caused by another undiscovered moon.
Gravitational forces between all particles were calculated and used to update the positions, speeds and accelerations in the computer models of the planet’s ring system.
Dr Sutton then added a moon that orbited at various ratios outside of the rings to test whether this caused gaps to form where expected.
Findings revealed that while the orbiting moon did have an effect on the scattering of particles along the ring edge, the expected gaps in the ring structure were unlikely to be caused by the gravitational forces of a currently unseen moon orbiting outside the rings
So the hunt for more exomoons – and the aliens that could potentially live on them – continues.
