Alien Life on Arctic Moon?! | Space's Deepest Secrets | Science Channel

Scientists are on the hunt for habitable exomoons, Earth-like moons that could harbor alien life. Tantalizing evidence of an exomoon with a potential giant ocean proves a near miss. Now, one of the largest telescopes on the planet joins the race. Astronomer Justin Krepp uses this mighty machine to hunt for planets that could have habitable Earth-like moons in orbit around them. He looks for moon-rich gas giants that lie within the so-called habitable zone of their star, the distance where it's not too hot and not too cold, but just right for life as we know it. In our solar system, Jupiter orbits pretty far from the sun, and its icy moons are icy. The water is frozen. But if Jupiter happened to orbit where the Earth is, those icy moons would be liquid. They'd have liquid water on their surfaces and maybe atmospheres. When we look at these other stars, we see these giant planets orbiting right around the place where they'd be getting as much light and heat as the Earth does. If they have these kinds of moons, that might be a really cool place to look for life. Today, Justin studies a Jupiter-sized planet called Kepler-86b. He analyzes the orbit to find out how far it sits from its star. Does this planet orbit within the habitable zone of its star? The length of the year of Kepler-86 is very similar to the amount of time that it takes Earth to go around the sun, around 280 days, which indicates for this type of star that it is indeed in the habitable zone. If this gas giant planet hosts a habitable moon, we can imagine its cosmic evolution. Just a few million years old, the newborn moon resembles a scorched ball of rock. Ferocious volcanic eruptions blanket the moon in a thick fog of gas. The moon's gravity holds onto this fog. It gives the moon an atmosphere and shields it against lethal radiation from its neighboring planet. Water condenses on the moon's surface, forming rivers, lakes, and oceans, perhaps allowing life to take hold, evolve, and thrive. But does this habitable Earth-like moon really exist? Justin searches for signs of a moon in the data. This figure shows the transit signal, and what we see is that there's a large dip that occurs when the planet passes in front of the star. For now, the data lacks the telltale signature of a moon, but the search is not over. NASA has launched a new space telescope called TESS. Justin plans to use this in combination with a large binocular telescope to accelerate the hunt for an Earth-like exomoon. NASA's TESS mission is very important in regards to exomoons. TESS is going to provide these targets for us, and we're gonna use facilities on the ground, like the large binocular telescope, to characterize the star so that we understand the planet, so that we ultimately understand the exomoon. We are really close to being able to detect exomoons. It could happen tonight. If we detect an exomoon around a gas giant planet, say, and that gas giant is receiving the same amount of light and heat from its star as we do, literally the first exomoon we find could be Earth-like. And that, to me, is extremely exciting. Astronomers are on the threshold of discovering the first exomoons in our galaxy, many worlds that may even harbor life. So far, they have targeted Earth-like moons around gas giants that orbit close to their star. But some believe that moons outside the habitable zone may harbor life, too, not on the surface, but deep below their frozen crusts. A clue comes from a moon in our own solar system, 745 million miles outside our sun's habitable zone, where there is barely any warmth from sunlight. Saturn's moon Enceladus has a surface temperature of almost 330 degrees below freezing. When the Cassini robot spacecraft passes over its south pole, it discovers something seemingly impossible. Jets of water shooting out through cracks in the moon's icy crust at more than 800 miles per hour. The images reveal something extraordinary about the interior of this moon. As Enceladus orbits around Saturn, the ever-changing pull from the massive planet warps and cracks its icy surface. Huge crevasses open up, exposing a warm liquid ocean beneath the icy crust. Saturn's gravity flexes and heats up the moon's rocky core, giving rise to powerful hydrothermal vents. These vents eject boiling, mineral-rich water into the ocean, creating one of the solar system's greatest miracles, liquid water warm enough to support life. When you look at Enceladus, it has all the ingredients for life as we know it. It's got a liquid water ocean inside of it. It's got an energy source, which you need for life, and that comes from Saturn stretching and compressing the moon itself. It's not that silly to think that there could be these similar conditions around other stars. And Enceladus is not alone. Jupiter's ice moon Europa may have the largest ocean in the solar system. The same gravitational heating effect keeps this ocean permanently warm, and its thick ice crust could shield against the deadly radiation from Jupiter's powerful magnetic field. People talk about a habitable zone, a place where a planet has to be to be warm enough for liquid water, but in fact, the real action where water is concerned is in the outer solar system. So when you think about the right conditions for life, you wanna look farther away from a star than you might first have assumed. Scientists think that across the galaxy, there could be billions of icy exomoons, just like Enceladus, that harbor hidden oceans. The big question, could life exist inside an icy exomoon?