Scientists have found many planets orbiting distant stars, but so far no proof that any have moons. Now, researchers have detected signs of a large exomoon orbiting a Jupiter-like world.
Scientists have found thousands of planets in recent years, but so far there's been no incontrovertible sighting of a moon around any of them.a researcher at Texas A&M University who also has been searching for moons."These detections tend to be right at the detection limit. So it's often difficult to disentangle the noise from the exomoon signal."
Existing telescopes aren't powerful enough to let astronomers see moons in other planetary systems directly. Instead, scientists can only infer the presence of a moon. If they see a tell-tale pattern of dimming in a star, for example, that can mean a moon and its planet are passing in front of the star and blocking some of its light.
Limbach thinks this new find, detected with the help of NASA's planet-finding Kepler telescope, is interesting."Certainly, you know, I think the object, the event, does warrant further follow-up with space-based observatories," she says."All the Kepler data is public and we can be sure another team will independently analyze the data," says
, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."This is a fascinating but perplexing discovery. We were not expecting moons larger than the size of Earth. This system, if real, is more like a double planet.", an astronomer with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.So far, astronomers have reported finding hints of exomoons about a dozen times using different techniques, says Limbach.
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