On the detectability of habitable exomoons with Kepler-class photometry

TL;DR

This study assesses the potential to detect habitable-zone exomoons using Kepler-like photometry, accounting for noise sources, and finds that moons as small as 0.2 Earth masses could be detectable around thousands of stars.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology to evaluate exomoon detectability considering various noise factors and demonstrates the feasibility of detecting small habitable-zone exomoons with Kepler data.

Findings

Habitable-zone exomoons down to 0.2 Earth masses are detectable.

Approximately 25,000 stars could be surveyed for habitable exomoons within Kepler's field.

A Galactic Plane survey could examine over one million stars for habitable exomoons.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the detectability of a habitable-zone exomoon around various configurations of exoplanetary systems with the Kepler Mission or photometry of approximately equal quality. We calculate both the predicted transit timing signal amplitudes and the estimated uncertainty on such measurements in order to calculate the confidence in detecting such bodies across a broad spectrum of orbital arrangements. The effects of stellar variability, instrument noise and photon noise are all accounted for in the analysis. We validate our methodology by simulating synthetic lightcurves and performing a Monte Carlo analysis for several cases of interest. We find that habitable-zone exomoons down to 0.2 Earth masses may be detected and ~25,000 stars could be surveyed for habitable-zone exomoons within Kepler's field-of-view. A Galactic Plane survey with Kepler-class photometry could potentially survey over one million stars for habitable-zone exomoons. In conclusion, we propose that habitable exomoons will be detectable should they exist in the local part of the galaxy.