Pandora From 'Avatar' Just Waiting to Be Discovered

Whether it's tree-covered Endor from the original Star Wars trilogy, or Pandora from the expected-to-be-huge James Cameron holiday blockbuster Avatar, distant worlds with their populated moons have long been the stuff of crowd-pleasing science fiction.

Astronomers are thinking that such settings are not entirely fictional, and that it's just a matter of time and of better tools before we uncover evidence of habitable moons.

A press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics looks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as the next generation of observational devices capable of collecting the data that will support such findings. The JWST is slated to launch in 2014 as a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, and will incorporate optics equipment of greater sensitivity and sophistication compared to the Hubble.

Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, in a paper published online at arXiv.org, argues that the JWST will permit the study of atmospheric composition and chemistry of moons orbiting the exoplanets of which we are finding more and more over recent years.

With existing telescope technology, astronomers have identified several hundred large (approximately Jupiter-sized) gas giants at varying orbital distances from their respective stars. While such planets are not thought to be likely hosts for life, gas giants commonly have rocky moons. So the theory goes that some of these moons may have the right stuff for life: water, chemically appropriate atmosphere, and sufficient gravity to maintain an atmosphere.

Kaltnegger provides insight into the potential for these possible findings she and her peers are eager to stake out over the next few years, saying in the release, "If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade." She then added: "All of the gas giant planets in our solar system have rocky and icy moons. That raises the possibility that alien Jupiters will also have moons. Some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold onto an atmosphere."

Image courtesy of CBC11, via Wikimedia Commons