The search for life doesn't end at our solar system and it is not limited to just planets. Scientists are now searching for moons orbiting alien planets in other systems that could harbor extraterrestrial life.
A new project called the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) is the first systematic search for exomoons, or moons that circle planets outside the solar system. Led by David Kipping at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, astronomers simulate billions of possible star-planet-moon arrangements using NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer.
Researchers then compare the results with the actually data taken with NASA's Kepler Telescope, which monitors the brightness of stars in an effort to find exoplanets that could support life. If one of the simulated combinations matches the data from Kepler, that area is marked for further exploration. Thus far the team has surveyed 56 of about 400 Kepler planet candidates that could have an exomoon.
The search requires a remarkable amount of computer power. For example, surveying the remaining 340 candidates would require about 50,000 processing hours per object and nearly a decade to complete on a smaller computer. The Pleiades Supercomputer can perform over 3 quadrillion calculations per second, knocking down that number to 30,000 processing hours per object and should complete the project in two years.
"For each planet where we don't discover an exomoon we are able to say how massive a moon is excluded by the current data, telling us about our sensitivity," Kipping said in a statement.
Unlike science fiction, researchers believe that the life they do discover won't be complex as often seen in the movies but could be simple as "some form of primitive biology." But if life does exist on one moon that could mean that there is also life on many more.
"If such habitable moons are possible, then there could even be more habitable moons than habitable planets," HEK scientists said on their website.
Currently, there are no official recording of an exomoon. Astronomers spotted what might be an exomoon last April, but scientists have not yet confirmed their existence. However, that doesn't mean it isn't worth investigating. The possibility does exist that an exomoon outside our solar system could support life and, if so, scientists hope they will find it.
"We won't have a chance to observe the exomoon candidate again," lead author of the study, David Bennett, of the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement. "But we can expect more unexpected finds like this."
Astronomers have discovered more than 1,700 alien planets to date, but they're still looking for their first confirmed exomoon.
