Despite this, some scientists estimate that there are as many habitable exomoons as habitable exoplanets. [10][11] Given the general planet-to-satellite (s) mass ratio of 10,000, gas giants in the habitable zone are thought to be the best candidates to harbour Earth-like moons. [12]

May 15, 2023 · An exomoon that gains a large fraction of its surface temperature from tidal heating would be far enough away from its host star that if it possesses a surface gravity any greater than Earth’s, it could retain too much ammonia and/or methane for the existence of nonexotic forms of physical life.

May 12, 2022 · The large majority of those moons have no chance of being habitable, but some of them—Europa and Enceladus, for example—are strong candidates in the search for life.

Feb 13, 2013 · This image shows an Earth-like "exomoon" orbiting a gas giant planet in a star's habitable zone.

Moons inside the habitable edge are in danger of running into a greenhouse by stellar and planetary illumination and/or tidal heating. Satellites outside the habitable edge with their host planet in the circumstellar IHZ are habitable by definition.

Mar 24, 2014 · A single gas giant planet in the not-too-warm, not-too-cold habitable zone around its star–where Earth and Mars correspondingly reside–could host several livable moons. At this early point in our hunt for exoplanets, most of the worlds we have found in the habitable zone are giants, not Earths.

Aug 8, 2017 · Using data from the Kepler space telescope, a pair of astronomers from Columbia University may have found the first example of an “exomoon”: a Neptune-size world circling a planet 10 times...

Habitable exomoon environments may be found across an exoplanetary system, largely irrespective of the distance to the host star. Small, icy subsurface habitable moons may exist anywhere beyond the snow line.

May 14, 2022 · There may be an exomoon around it with a 70 percent chance of life. Two other gas giants in different systems may have Earth-like moons with a probability of 69 and 64 percent. A suitable moon for life may also be the super-earth Kepler-458 b, which may have a biosphere.

Heller and Barnes have proposed a circumplanetary "habitable edge," similar to the well-established circumstellar "habitable zone." This zone is the temperature band around a star within which...