Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun.
A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating – that is to say, for almost as long as the Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.
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