Habitable Moons: Background and Prospects

As most of my readers probably already know, I frequently write articles that are published in various print and online periodicals in addition to the material for this web site. Recently, I accepted a gracious invitation from Paul Gilster to become a regular contributor to the Centauri Dreams web site which specializes in discussing “peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities”. Considering how much I have enjoyed reading this web site over the years and its overlap with my own interests, I am confident that this will be a good match.

My first contribution to Centauri Dreams, “Habitable Moons: Background and Prospects”, has now been posted. With the discovery of the first extrasolar giant planets starting almost two decades ago, I became fascinated with the prospects of habitable moons as more giant planets, which were too big to be habitable themselves, were found in or near their systems’ habitable zones. This essay in Centauri Dreams presents some background on the beginnings of the scientific investigation of the possibility of habitable moons and provides material summarizing the current state of the field including  efforts to search for exomoons using photometric observations like those collected by NASA’s continuing Kepler mission.

 

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Related Reading

“Habitable Moons: Background and Prospects”, Centauri Dreams, September 19, 2014 [Post]

“Habitable Moons”, Sky & Telescope, Vol. 96, No. 6, pp. 50-56, December 1998 [On line version]

“Habitable Moons: A New Frontier for Exobiology”, SETIQuest, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 8-16, First Quarter 1997 [Article]

“Publication Watch: Habitable Moons Around Extrasolar Giant Planets”, SETIQuest, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 16-22, Second Quarter 1997 [Article]

“GJ 832c: Habitable Super Earth or Super Venus?”, Drew Ex Machina, June 27, 2014 [Post]

“Habitable Planet Reality Check: 55 Cancri f”, Drew Ex Machina, May 7, 2014 [Post]