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I am asking this question, “How would it be possible for the moon of a gas giant to naturally be habitable for human life?” Specifically, I’m looking at these criteria:

  1. Has a tropical climate with oceans of liquid water and islands scattered throughout.
  2. Has an atmosphere that humans can breathe, and is at an mean temperature that’s somewhere between 294 and 303 Kelvin.
  3. Has a mass that’s at least .027 Earth masses, and enough atmosphere and magnetic field to protect it from the gas giant’s radiation belts.
  4. The gas giant has a mass that’s between .1 and 80 Jupiter masses, and orbits within its sun(s)’ habitable zone.
  5. The moon orbits close to the gas giant, so tidal forces permit tectonic activity, but a safe distance from the Roche limit.

For the mass of the sun, or if it’s a multiple-sun system, anything that allows the moon to get a mean temperature that’s in the specified range would do. For life, it’s primitive, and still far from forming civilizations. And if you have any calculations, show me please. And feel free to share any tidbits about the moon’s appearance and what it’d be like staying there.

TysonDennis
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    Honestly, if you toss an Earth-sized moon into orbit around a gas giant in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star, tide-lock it to the gas giant, and calculate the orbital period to be a reasonable value, almost nobody will complain if you're writing a setting for a story and not a scientific paper about planetary formation. – notovny Nov 30 '20 at 23:44
  • That sounds like it could work. In fact, I might go with it. – TysonDennis Dec 01 '20 at 00:43
  • Other candidates for duplicate include this and this. – JBH Dec 01 '20 at 00:43
  • @TysonDennis You should check out https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2007/RAND_CB179-1.pdf and also research scientific discussions of exomoon habitabiity like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_exomoon and articles by Rene Heller on the subject such as https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/ and see .https://phys.org/news/2013-09-magnetic-shielding-exomoons.html – M. A. Golding Dec 01 '20 at 22:21

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