Solar eclipse seen from California’s Trona Pinnacles Desert National Reserve. Scientists believe that there may be more moons in the galaxy than planets.
NASA / Lauren Hughes / NASA / Lauren Hughes
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NASA / Lauren Hughes / NASA / Lauren Hughes
Solar eclipse seen from California’s Trona Pinnacles Desert National Reserve. Scientists believe that there may be more moons in the galaxy than planets.
NASA / Lauren Hughes / NASA / Lauren Hughes
The hunt for moons outside our solar system has just spawned another possible lunar world, one larger than Earth orbiting a Jupiter-like planet.
The planet and its moon – if it is indeed a moon – orbit a Sun-like star more than 5,000 light-years away, according to a new study. report in the magazine Natural astronomy.
“The moon is quite alien compared to any moon in the solar system,” David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. “We’re not sure if it’s rocky, we’re not sure if it’s gas. It’s about the same size as Neptune, which is gaseous, and Earth, which is rocky.”
This isn’t the first time astronomers have spotted what could be a moon in another planetary system, sometimes called an exoplanet system.
In fact, Kipping and his colleagues announced a few years ago that they had discovered something like a moon orbiting another planet. That discover has not yet been confirmed with additional telescope observations, and some astronomers are incredulous that it will be scrutinized more closely.
This new finding also needs to be confirmed, says Kipping. “Again it’s another surprisingly large moon, if it’s real.”
Exomoons may be popular, but they’re hard to find
There are more moons than planets in our solar system, so it makes sense that planets orbiting other stars will also have moons. Scientists want to find them, in part because the moon might have the right conditions for life.
“If you’ve seen Avatar or Star Wars, you’re probably familiar with the idea that the moons, in and of themselves, can exist,” says Kipping. And real-life moons like Jupiter Europa and of Saturn Enceladus is said to have features like liquid water that can sustain life.
Scientists have found thousands of planets in recent years, but so far there have been no uncontrollable cases of moons around any of the planets.
“Finding these exomoons is extremely difficult,” said Mary Anne Limbach, a researcher at Texas A&M University who is also looking for moons. “These findings tend to be right at the detection limit. Therefore, it is difficult to remove noise from the exomoon signal.”
Existing telescopes are not powerful enough to allow astronomers to directly see moons in other planetary systems. Instead, scientists can only infer the presence of a moon. For example, if they see a narrative pattern of a star’s dimming, it could mean a moon and its planet are passing in front of the star and blocking some of its light. it.
Limbach thinks this new discovery, discovered with the help of NASA’s planet-searching Kepler telescope, is exciting. “Definitely, you know, I think the object, the event, needs further tracking with observatories in space,” she said.
Others are also taking a wait-and-see attitude.
“All Kepler data is public and we can be sure that another team will analyze the data independently,” Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This is a fascinating but confusing discovery. We did not expect moons to be larger than the size of Earth. This system, if real, is more like a binary planet.”
“I don’t believe it yet, but I think this is definitely a promising candidate worth watching.” Laura Kreidberg, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Searching for “the biggest weirdos in the universe”
So far, astronomers have reported finding signs of exomoons using different techniques, Limbach said. She added that most of those observations, for technical reasons, cannot be tracked or confirmed.
But other exomoon statements are possible, like this new one as well one that Limbach and colleagues recently reported.
Note that his two candidate moons both seem oddly large.
“But if they weren’t weirdly large, we would never have been able to detect them,” he said. “So it’s only natural that the first things you’d detect would be the biggest oddities in the universe. They’re not necessarily common, they’re just the easiest to find for us.”
New telescopes, like the recently launched telescope James Webb . Space Telescope and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope slated for launch later this decade, there will be more possibilities for finding and confirming the presence of moons, even small ones.
Seager said astronomers wanted to find evidence of a moon or supermoon around a planet orbiting a nearby star, because that would make it easier to make follow-up measurements. than.
The first confirmed moons in other solar systems will be exciting discoveries, says Limbach, not only because they are moons and not planets, but also because in many cases they may be. rocky world with all kinds of conditions suitable for life.
“I definitely think,” she said, “this decade will hopefully lead to the first confirmation of an eruptive system.”
