Astronomers say they have found a second plausible candidate for a moon beyond our solar system, an exomoon, orbiting a world nearly 6,000 light-years from Earth.
And then there were two—maybe. Called Kepler-1708 b-i, the moon appears to be a gas-dominated object, slightly smaller than Neptune, orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet around a sunlike star—an unusual but not wholly unprecedented planet-moon configuration. The findings appear in Nature Astronomy.
Kepler-1708 b-i’s existence was first hinted at in 2018, during an examination of archival data by David Kipping of Columbia University, one of the discoverers of Kepler-1625 b-i, and his colleagues. The team analyzed transit data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope of 70 so-called cool giants—gas giants, such as Jupiter and Saturn, that orbit relatively far from their stars, with years consisting of more than 400 Earth days.
“One scenario is this moon got captured by the planet as the planetary system was forming,” Christiansen says. “Early planetary systems are quite violent, chaotic places. We see examples of capture in our own solar system: for instance, Triton, one of Neptune’s moons. We think that was captured. So we know that this can happen, we just hadn’t scaled it up to the idea that a Jupiter-sized planet could capture a Neptune-sized moon.
That in itself raises an exciting possibility: JWST could be used to perform some sort of survey to look for exomoons. In the way its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, has made huge strides in exoplanet science, JWST might prove to be defined by its contribution to exomoons. “My team right now is planning out what an exomoon survey strategically would look like for Webb,” Kipping says. “It will be the first time in human history that will be possible. I’m really excited about the future.
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