I mean, we live in a planet orbiting a gas giant that just happened to have achieved fusion. So it's not that far fetched

Yeah, gaseous planets like Jupiter aren't too uncommon, it's just its distance from the Sun that is. As planets like those like to migrate to weeklong orbits for some reason, But because of Saturn (or maybe not, we don't know for sure) Jupiter never migrated that far into the Solar System.

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Carl Sagan and other well loved astrologists have considered that Jupiter is a proto-star.

And then, can you imagine the possibilities!!

The moons are just there, there's no precalculated purpose. It's left-over rubble that didn't make it to form a planet. Or it was a planet but now destroyed. Or it was part of another solar system, but no longer there.

There are many aspects that makes a planet livable. Jupiter's atmosphere is not one of them. Most is gaseous.

Our moon was formed by the rubble of a collision with another planet. This collision itself made things surface from the planetary core that would not be there without that collision, like Iron. It is likely that it also caused the tilt creating seasonal variation, while the Moon itself is causing a slightly more frequent variation in the form of tides and perhaps affecting tectonic plates. All these variations and stirring of material may be the cause of live.

Does it have to be important ? It is what it is, that is important and what we will learn about it.

Because it's a gas giant with no terrestrial surface, gravity that will crush you like a beverage can, and temperatures that will freeze you almost instantly.

Moon = Equal habitable planet. Moons are a result of gravitational pull from a celestial body. Jupiter has more mass, this more gravity and more moons.

Earth is habitable due to many reasons. Perfect distance from the sun, it isn’t constantly hit by asteroids, it has an iron core which creates a magnetic field which helps deflect cosmic rays, it has a perfectly blended atmosphere to trap some green house gasses and make us nice and warm but not too warm, so on and so forth.

Moons aren’t very special, they’re just debris that’s been captured by the gravity of a planet. Earths moon doesn’t “make earth livable” it makes earth more livable, and it’s not that important to life as we know it.

Jupiter has many moons surrounding it because it’s the second largest (in both size and (more importantly) mass) object in our solar system, so many things are captured by its gravity. Many of these satellites (not like our man-made satellites, simply something that orbits a planet) are large and -importantly- reflective. When moons are highly reflective, we have a much easier time spotting them because they shine with the sun’s light. However, smaller and less reflective satellites are much harder to discover.

Finding these Jupiter moons is less about the moons themselves, but instead the means in which we were able to detect them. More sensitive tools and techniques are being developed, leading to more discoveries day after day.

how is that possible ? with 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, stating that a gas giant is rare doesn t sound correct. did we check all 100 b systems and validated that all planets within?

Ah but you're not converting from Elon time to real time

"Social system"

Well I'm glad to know the planets have a way of talking, I'm sure it gets awful lonely out there lol

Can someone help me which type of telescope should i buy i am just casual no dslr and a tight budget

I too wish to live on a moon orbiting a gas giant.

Most moons around here are just potato-shaped rocks, slightly larger than average. When they are massive enough to be spherical, now we are talking.

I'm with this guy. People need to be more realistic about starship, where it is in development, and the high likelihood there are going to be teething pains and developmental delays due to unforeseen technical issues arising.

lol when did space become so polarized. There are the same such people rooting for SLS to fail because "insert reason"

There's a million reasons why earth is habitable and nothing else is. In fact in all that we have been able to observe the Earth is the only place with the exact perfect conditions to support life. Change any of those things a little bit and the earth is dead. So it's not just moons.

Jupiter has a lot of moons because Jupiter is huge and that gravity captures a lot of rocks flying through space. It's also incredibly radioactive and any living thing near Jupiter would be killed pretty quickly from radiation.

The moons don't really mean anything. Jupiter himself is a unique case. He's a huge lad who regularly consumes potentially Earth-destroying astroids, so praise him for that. Also, those moons might have killed Earth before humans even existed. The huge lad in our backyard is therefore very appreciated.

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I thought it not that a gas giant like Jupiter was unusual, but that gas giants like Jupiter are usually in much closer orbits. That's how it acts as a shield of sorts for us, whereas many other observed systems have their huge gas giants in close orbits.

Powers of 10 is not strictly about space, but a good portion of it lives there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

if there were no moons there would be no loonies and without loonies no monster raving loonies and so no monster raving loony party

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_Party

what kind of Britain would this be if it never existed