Project to seek moon outside solar system

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 23 (UPI) -- With the discovery of planets orbiting distant stars almost routine, a U.S. researcher say he wants to extend the search to a new target: distant moons.

"It's the next big thing in the field," David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We've found rocky planets as small as Mars. The big challenge now is trying to find a moon."

Kipping is leading the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project, a year-old effort that joins astronomers from several institutions in the search for moons outside our solar system, a Harvard University release said Tuesday.

The project uses publicly available data from the Kepler Space Telescope, an orbital telescope dedicated to the search for exoplanets outside the solar system.

Moons abound in our own our solar system, with 176 circling six of the eight planets, 67 of them around Jupiter.

"You look at our system and say moons have to be common. But we don't know whether that's true empirically," Kipping says. "We have no prejudice about whether we'll find these things or not. Either way, we should be able to say something profound about the universe."

Moons large enough to be detected by Kepler will also be large enough so their gravity will hold onto an atmosphere, Kipping said, and if one of those moons is orbiting a planet in their star's habitable "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot and not too cold --it could be a place where life might arise.