Aliens – they aren’t just the cornerstone of science fiction; they’re at the center of a key question for astronomers and philosophers alike: “Are we alone in the universe?”
Recently, NASA has made strides toward answering this question through its search for potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system. Not only could finding such a planet teach us about what helped a planet as unique as Earth come to be, but it could potentially reinforce or completely topple our understanding of life.
But planets aren’t the only celestial bodies that offer so much potential, which is why a team based at Harvard University has launched the Hunt for Exomoons (HEK) project to find moons that might support life.
For sci-fi movie buffs, the search for habitable moons should come as no surprise, thanks to fictional worlds such as Star Wars’ Forest Moon of Endor, or Avatar’s Pandora.
So why have we only just started the search? Exomoons, or moons outside of our solar system, are so small that they’re very difficult to find, even for NASA’s specially designed space observatory Kepler.
As a result the HEK team is marrying the Kepler telescope to the power of NASA’s SGI ICE supercomputer, Pleiades, to sort through the data and possibly uncover some habitable moons along the way.
Led by David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the astronomers developed a unique computational method based on an in-house LUNA light curve modeling algorithm and a massively parallel sampling algorithm called MultiNest. The combination of algorithms facilitated the simulation of billions of alignments between stars, planets and moons. The team compares these findings with Kepler data to identify any matches.
Already Kepler has found approximately 400 possible exomoon candidates. And while Kipping and his team have investigated 56 of these, surveying the remaining 340 over the next two years will consume roughly 10 million processor hours on Pleiades. The petascale supercomputer is a key enabler for the project, which would have taken nearly a decade to complete on smaller machines, according to the research brief.
Beyond the quest for celestial bodies that could be habitable, the investigation will provide the additional benefit of giving scientists a much greater sense of how frequently moons appear in our galaxy.