Rogue-Planet Exomoons: Tidal Heating and Thick Hydrogen Atmospheres Could Sustain Liquid Water for Billions of Years

To the point

David Dahlbüdding and collaborators show that moons around rogue planets could keep liquid surface water for long periods through tidal heating from their giant host planet and thick hydrogen atmospheres that trap heat, making them plausible habitats without a nearby star.

Can Life Begin on a Moon Without a Sun?
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Can Life Begin on a Moon Without a Sun?

Free-Floating Planets, or as they are more commonly known, Rogue Planets, wander interstellar space completely alone. Saying there might be a lot of them is a bit of an understatement. Recent estimates put the number of Rogue Planets at something equivalent to the number of stars in our galaxy. Some of them, undoubtedly, are accompanied by moons - and some of those might even be the size of Earth. A new paper, accepted for publication into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also available in pre-print on arXiv, by David Dahlbüdding of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and his co-authors, describes how some of those rogue exo-moons might even have liquid water on their surfaces.