“Unstable” moons could wipe out extraterrestrial life across the universe

“Unstable” moons could wipe out extraterrestrial life across the universe

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  • March 16, 2023
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The impact of the moon on the earth may sound like an unrealistic doomsday scenario or the stuff of science fiction catastrophes. But for some planets in other star systems, such catastrophic collisions can be common.

New research, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, uses computer simulations to show that collisions between exoplanets and their moons (called exomonds) can indeed occur regularly, which is catastrophic for any burgeoning extraterrestrial life on those planets could be.

While astronomers are yet to make reliable evidence of an exomond, scientists expect them to be abundant in the universe.

“We know of many moons in our own solar system, so naturally we would expect to see moons in exoplanet systems,” Jonathan Brande, a University of Kansas astrophysicist who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Live Science in an e-mail. Mail . As such, theorists like Brad Hansen, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of the new study, are keen to explore how extraterrestrial moons and exoplanets can interact and how those interactions affect the potential for life in distant star systems.

Runaway moons

Gravity governs the interactions between a planet and its moons, manifesting itself as tides and other effects, such as the slow recession of our own moon. Each year, Earth’s Moon creeps a little more than an inch farther from our planet, with its orbit increasing each year. At the same time, the earth rotates a little more slowly every year. These two effects are directly related: the Earth gives up some of the angular momentum from its rotation to the Moon’s orbit.

If this compromise lasted long enough, the moon could eventually be detached from Earth. Luckily for us, this process would take so long that the sun would explode long before the moon could fully escape. But around some exoplanets, particularly those much closer to their stars than Earth is to the Sun, this situation could develop much faster, with planets and their “unstable” moons colliding within the first billion years of their formation, Hansens said calculations. (For comparison: the earth and its moon are about 4.5 billion years old).

In his simulations, moons that migrated away from their host planets often returned with a bang, shattering the planet and creating huge clouds of dust. These dust clouds glowed in the infrared as they were illuminated and heated by the star’s light. But they only lasted about 10,000 years before fading – a cosmic blink of an eye.

Observations by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope suggest that every star will undergo such an event at some point in its lifetime, Hansen said. It’s plausible that these dust emissions represent the collisions between planets and their moons, he added.

However, because these dust clouds are so short-lived, astronomers have only observed about a dozen of them. Also, some astronomers are still not convinced that these dust clouds came from exomonds, suggesting that they could result from collisions between two planets. In any case, further observations are needed to find out the role of exomonds in the evolution of an exoplanet and whether these collisions can affect extraterrestrial life.

“Moons are often seen as helpful,” Hansen said. They are believed to help stabilize the tilt of the planet’s axis and provide gentler seasons that are more conducive to life. However, a collision like in Hansen’s simulations would certainly outweigh this advantage, as any chance of life would be destroyed in a fiery explosion.

“Every few weeks it seems like this a CGI video This is going viral and shows Earth being devastated by a massive cosmic impactor,” Brande added. Not the best result in the search for extraterrestrial life, but still worth knowing.”

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