Exomoon Tidal Heating Detection

Moons squeezed by an eccentric orbit around a giant planet flex internally and dissipate that strain as heat — exactly the mechanism keeping Io's volcanoes erupting. This simulator lets you dial in an exomoon's eccentricity, orbital distance and tidal dissipation efficiency (k₂/Q), then watches the orbit-averaged tidal heating power feed back into the moon's radiative energy balance. The payoff is the detection side: because that heat has to be re-radiated as extra infrared light, a tidally active exomoon runs measurably hotter than an insolation-only model predicts — an excess that shows up as an anomaly in the combined star-planet-moon light curve, which is a real proposed way to infer a moon's existence without resolving it directly. Live readouts track the heating power against Io's real output, the insolation-only versus actual temperature, and a simplified detection significance against an assumed photometric noise floor, alongside a light-curve chart comparing the baseline to the modelled excess.