Exoplanets

Titan that is the largest moon of Saturn is the only moon in our solar system that has a dense atmosphere. Titan is also the only object in our solar system except for earth that has liquids on the surface. Titan has just like earth a landscape with rivers and lakes it has a variating climate with wind and rain. The river and lakes are liquid methane and the atmosphere consists of nitrogen. The average surface temperature in -179 C or -290 F. Not even the most resistant living organisms that are known on Earth would ever survive on Titan and many scientists find it very unlikely that life could exist on Titan. However, it would not be theoretically impossible for life on Titan. Perhaps organisms that been developed on Titan differs from the one developed on Earth. Perhaps those lifeforms like freezing liquid methane just like we like water. Huygens probe that landed successfully on Titan in 2005 was not equipped to provide evidence for biosignatures. More probes to investigate Saturn’s moons has been proposed in the future, though.

credit  NASA/JPL-Caltech

In our solar system, the inner planets are terrestrial and the outer planets are gas giants and according to the theory of solar system formation, massive Jovians can only form in the cold outer regions of the system.

But still, it is very common that exosolar systems have so-called hot Jovians. A hot jovian is a gas giant that is orbiting close to its sun. The first one orbiting a sun-like star was discovered In 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz around the star 51 Pegasi. One explanation could be that young large Jovians formed in the outer regions of their solar system gains enough gravitational force that it reduces the planet's orbital energy causing the planet to migrate inward. 827 hot Jovians and 139 warm Jovians have been discovered so far. If a jovian is in the habitable zone of its star it could have moons. Just like Titan the moon could have atmosphere and oceans and those oceans could be water instead of methane and the temperature could be similar to earth. Perhaps an alien civilization exists on a moon instead of a planet. The science fiction movie Avatar from 2009 takes place on the moon Pandora orbiting the gas giant Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri A system. Alpha Centauri A does look like a pleasant home for exoplanets the star emits far less radiation than our sun, but no one is found so far.

We have not discovered any Exomoons yet because as those are very hard to detect and confirm using current techniques. In July 2017 Hubble Space Telescope found signs of a Neptune-sized exomoon around the planet Kepler-1625b. Theoretical it could be possible with James Webb Space Telescope in the future to detect images of exomoons. Some scientists estimate that there are as many habitable exomoons as habitable exoplanets. There are several candidates with possible habitable exomoons in the PHL exoplanet catalog. It is possible both in the Android app and in this website catalog to filter for candidates with possible habitable exomoons.

Tomorrow in Stockholm will the ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Physics be held.

The Swedish chemist and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel. Died 10 December 1896 in San Remo Italy. Nobel was also a very rich businessman and he was before his death very concerned that the world would not remember him after his death. So he wrote a testament that his fortune should be used to award big contributions to science. The prizes were in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology. The prizes were first awarded in 1901 and Wilhelm Röntgen received the prize in Physics for the detection of electromagnetic radiation in wavelength of X-rays. This year's prize in Physics goes to James Peebles the father of modern cosmology. Peebles has done achievements in cosmology since 1970 and much modern cosmology is based on his ideas and calculations.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

He will share the prize with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. The first exoplanet discovered was 51 Pegasi b. 51 Pegasi is 50 lightyears from earth in the constellation Pegasus and is like our sun a G-type star. The star has an exoplanet 51 pegasi b that is 150 times more massive than Earth and is located at a distance of 0.05 AU from its star with an obit of 4 days it is a so-called hot Jupiter. Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the planet by measuring the variation of the color from the starlight. The method is based on the concept that a planet system is orbiting around its centrum of mass and when the star moves from us the color of the light will shift towards red. The discovery was made on October 6, 1995. At the time the scientist thought that planetary systems around other stars always was formed in the same way as ours. The discovery came as a surprise. Now we have found that hot Jupiters are common and the scientists had to rethink their theories about how planetary systems are formed.