Avatar has become the fastest movie yet to break box office records for hitting US$1 billion in ticket sales. Now astronomers says it could be possible to find an Earth-like world as depicted in the film.
Credit: 20th Century Fox
SYDNEY: Habitable alien moons such as 'Pandora' – the world featured in the blockbuster film Avatar – could be detectable within a decade, says a new study.
In that movie, the fictional, life-harbouring moon is found orbiting a gas giant called Polyphemus, which itself orbits the star Alpha Centauri A.
NASA's Kepler Mission has already shown the potential to detect Earth-sized planets within the Milky Way (see "Kepler telescope finds five new exoplanets").
Detecting Pandora
Until now, astronomers have mainly found Jupiter-sized planets; which are easy to detect because they are so large.
But scientists have begun to speculate that life is also likely to be found on the moons of gas giants, orbiting within the 'habitable zone' of their stars – the region warm enough for liquid water to exist (see "Weird worlds").
"If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade," said study author Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Boston, USA.
"All of the gas giant planets in our Solar System have rocky and icy moons. That raises the possibility that alien 'Jupiters' will also have moons and some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold onto an atmosphere," she said.
Planetary transits
Astronomers detect planets orbiting host stars by measuring their transits - partial eclipses which occur when the planet crosses the path of the star.
They then detect if there are moons orbiting the planets by looking for a wobble in the movement of the planet caused by the gravity of its moon.
Given the ideal conditions, Kaltenegger predicts that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to replace Hubble in 2014, should be able to study the atmospheres of Earth-sized exo-moons and detect key gasses like carbon dioxide and oxygen as well as water vapour.
Discovery of new moons
Lets hope not. If we discover these wonderful places, then it's likely we'll take our machinery and our ideology and trash the place. Leave well enough alone, I say. We don't always have to to conquering or dominating nature.
Kay
What about Titan
Titan is cold, yes, but hardly qualifies as strictly rocky or icy. It has both, and oceans of liquid methane. While it may not be ideal to support life as we know it (which doesn't cross out any other life as we do not yet know it), when our sun starts dying and expands, that moon would be a very ideal place to be. A "young earth" as they call it.
At Cross Purpose
To mislead Science through Fiction is easier than do research
sorry but
sci-fi may the idea first and then it is researched it; it is imagination that starts research no matter the source, no matter the subject. it is imagination that pushes us; without imagination all we have is