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Comment Actually, habitable is a reletive term (Score 1) 64

by Lord Northern (#29322669) Attached to: Kepler Mission Could Detect Exomoons
When talking about "habitability" in the context of Kepler Mission, it's more like "as much as Kepler can say about this object's Habitability". It's not necessarily that the planet or the moon are within the so called habitable zone. Since Kepler is able to analyze the atmosphere on some of the bigger objects, a planet within the habitable zone but with an invalid atmosphere or for example a gas giant would not be considered "habitable" by Kepler's standards. It also includes many other factors. Not just the location of the object within the habitable zone of its star.
Space

Submission + - Kepler believed to be able to discover exomoons! (redorbit.com)

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Lord Northern
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."

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