Submission + - Kepler believed to be able to discover exomoons! (redorbit.com)
Lord Northern writes: "According to several news sources, Kepler mission is said to be able to detect habitable moons orbiting planets on other solar systems.
Kepler is a NASA space telescope designed to detect exoplanets. It'll be on its mission orbiting the sun for 3.5 years at the end of which we'll be able to tell which of our neighboring stars actually have planetary systems around them.
However, apparently we will be able to detect not only exoplanets, but also exomoons orbiting those exoplanets. The Kepler team came to that conclusion after running a computer simulation, which found that the telescope was sensitive enough to detect gravitational pull of an orbiting moon which means that the data expected by the end of the mission is going to be very rich as it is said that moons as small as 0.2 times the mass of earth could be detected."
Kepler is a NASA space telescope designed to detect exoplanets. It'll be on its mission orbiting the sun for 3.5 years at the end of which we'll be able to tell which of our neighboring stars actually have planetary systems around them.
However, apparently we will be able to detect not only exoplanets, but also exomoons orbiting those exoplanets. The Kepler team came to that conclusion after running a computer simulation, which found that the telescope was sensitive enough to detect gravitational pull of an orbiting moon which means that the data expected by the end of the mission is going to be very rich as it is said that moons as small as 0.2 times the mass of earth could be detected."
