Though moons are ubiquitous in our Solar System, we have not yet found one elsewhere (an exomoon). Today’s paper investigates whether we could find moons by precisely tracking the positions of a star and planet.
Today’s paper reports evidence for a new exomoon Kepler-1708 b-i, a mini-Neptune sized moon orbiting a Jupiter-like planet!
How do moons form in the universe? Astronomers recently gathered direct evidence for the formation of moons around exoplanets!
Simulations by astronomers at Columbia University suggest an evaporating exomoon could be behind the mysterious dimming behaviour of KIC 8462852.
Today’s authors carefully check their evidence for the first potential exomoon detection.
Despite years of searching, we’ve yet to find an “exomoon”.
The authors of today’s paper suggest a new way to find them. Instead of the optical telescopes favoured by exoplanet searches, Noyola et al. turn to the giant radio telescopes. They suggest that they could be able to detect signals from extrasolar equivalents of one of the Solar system’s most extreme objects: Jupiter’s moon Io.