NASA hunts for Avatar's moon Pandora
From Star Wars' forest moon of Endor to Pandora, the alien moon in Avatar, habitable moons have become a staple of science fiction.
And now Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger reckons the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) should be able to identify any that might be lurking out there, by studying their atmospheres and detecting key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.
"If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade," said Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
For obvious reasons, most exoplanets discovered so far are gas giants, which can't serve as homes for life as we know it. But the rocky moons which orbit them are a different matter.
"Alien moons orbiting gas giant planets may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths," said Kaltenegger. "We should certainly keep them in mind as we work toward the ultimate goal of finding alien life."
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