Avatar, the latest creation from Hollywood legendary director, James Cameron has created ripples across the entertainment industry with its cutting edge graphics and because of the creation of a whole new world called Pandora, which has been depicted as an alien moon, far away from earth. But this science fiction world of Pandora could very well be a reality, if NASA’s Kepler mission succeeds in finding new habitable earth like planets and moons.

In a latest released by astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has revealed that, if ever such celestial bodies are found by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), then it would bring new insight into the atmospheric composition of these planets and moons by studying gases present in there such as, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.

According to Lisa Kaltenegger,

“If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade. All of the gas giant planets in our solar system have rocky and icy moons. That raises the possibility that alien Jupiters will also have moons. Some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold onto an atmosphere.”

The current study revolves around the search for planets that create mini eclipses for their moons by crossing in front of their natural satellites. The scientists are banking upon the prospect of finding such a planet, after which they would then be searching for the planet’s exomoons. The presence of a moon for a planet would be determined by the transition speed of the planet that can only be affected by the presence of a corresponding moon.

Via Space Wars.