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Forget the love. Scientists want to know: are we looking life in the wrong place?
An astrophysicist at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom has said that the exomoons, moons that orbit planets outside our solar system, may contain liquid water and thus promote life.
"These moons can be internally heated by the gravitational pull of the planet they orbit, which can cause them to have liquid water well outside the normal living area for the planets we are currently trying to to find planets similar to Earth "Phil Sutton said in a statement. "I think if we can find them, moons offer a more promising way to find an extra-terrestrial life."
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So far, 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered, but Sutton suspects that "only a small proportion of them is able to survive", but some of the larger ones, especially gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn of the Milky Way could be in the "habitable zone" of their stars.
Artist concept of a moon orbiting a planet with rings. (Credit: Marcel / Adobe Stock)
The habitable zone is defined as "the orbital region around a star in which a planet similar to the Earth can possess liquid water on its surface and possibly support life."
Sutton, who published his research in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, posed the question of whether the J1407b exoplanet could have a moon capable of sustaining life.
Discovered in 2012, J1407b is an exoplanet whose rings are 200 times larger than Saturn. NASA had previously described it as a "Super Saturn".
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Sutton exploited computer models to look at the planet and its rings. He then added a moon to different ratios to see if it was causing holes to form and found that the particles along the edge of the ring were scattered. A similar observation was made with Saturn and his moon Mimas.
The list of exomoons is much smaller than the list of exoplanets. In 2018, NASA's Kepler and Hubble space telescopes spotted the trace of an exoplanet orbiting a satellite of Neptune's size, Kepler-1625b.
According to Space.com, there could be up to 100 exoplanets with exomoons. In comparison, there are more than 150 moons for the eight planets of the solar system, according to data compiled by NASA.
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