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The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project has identified around 100 potential light curves that could reveal moons orbiting alien worlds already found by the Kepler Space Telescope.

Planets with moons are a common feature in our Solar System, and with an abundance of planets found around other stars it is only natural to assume that many of these planets also have moons. NASA’s Kepler mission is tasked with hunting for Earth-like planets that orbit in the habitable zones (HZs) of their parent stars, the area around a star where the temperature is just right for water to be present in a liquid state. Discovering planets within the HZ does not necessarily make them habitable though, especially if they are gas giants. However, if a moon orbited a gas giant within the HZ, then the moon would be a possible location for life to flourish.

Detecting exomoons is no easy task, but it is thought that signals of these moons could be hidden somewhere within the Kepler database of transiting exoplanet light curves, and the hunt is now on to find these signals. The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) was initiated six months ago, and David Kipping from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discussed the details at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester this week.