Tidal Heating Could Make Exomoons Much More Habitable (and Detectable) universetoday storybywill
Illustration of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites. Credit: NASA
Considering how plentiful “Ocean Worlds” are in the Solar System, it is likely that similar planets and multi-moon systems can be found throughout our galaxy. As Piro explained to Universe Today via email, the presence of exomoons has a lot of important implications for life, including:Tidal interactions can prevent planets from tidally locking with their host star, impacting the climate
In short, the interactions between a planet and its satellites can affect the habitability of both. As Tokadjian and Piro showed in a previous paper using two candidate exoplanets as an example , the presence of exomoons can even be used to explore the interior of exoplanets. In the case of multi-moon systems, said Tokadjian and Piro, the amount of tidal heating depends on several factors.
In their paper, Tokadjian and Piro considered moons in a 2:1 orbital resonance around planets of varying size and type . According to their results, the largest tidal heating will occur in moons that orbit rocky Earth-like planets with an orbital period of two to four days. In this case, the tidal luminosity was over 1000 times that of Io, and the tidal temperature reached 480 K .
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