Alex Teachey "I expect it to be a habitable exomoon”

Sifting through data from NASAs Kepler, astronomers believe that we could have picked up the first signal of an alien moon. Co-discoverer and astronomer Alex Teachey reveals if we should be getting our hopes up

- Lee Cavendish

BIO

Alex Teachey
Teachey is a distinguished postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei, Taiwan. Alex has been studying and searching for exoplanets and exomoons for many years now, scouring data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope. He has previously worked at both the American Museum of Natural History and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Why do think that exomoons play such an important role in understanding our universe? 

I think that there’s a couple of reasons why we’re so interested in exomoons. First of all, I think that they could really tell us a lot about the formation of our Solar System and the formation of other solar systems. Certainly they tell us about the system we see them in, but the question always arises about life evolving on Earth. Were these circumstances on Earth very common across the galaxy, or were they very special? I think that it’s very much an open question. 

I think exomoons can play a part in answering that question because we’ve seen moons all over the place in our Solar System, and there’s good reason to think they could be elsewhere. Until we see moons, it’s very much an open question whether we’ve got an unusual formation history or whether this is something that happens all over the place.