Since the first exoplanet was found in 1992, more than 4,000 have been mapped. Although at the time it was a great find, today discovering worlds beyond the star system near Earth is something more common. NASA has come to discover 700 exoplanets in a single study. However, the existence of moons outside our solar system has yet to be confirmed, although researchers may have found a new extrasolar moon candidate.
Science fiction has always been one of the most recurrent genres in cinema and now it is also being so in series. We can enjoy science fiction movies on Disney + or other streaming platforms, which, although as is commonly said: reality is stranger than fiction, they help us to learn a little more about the unknown secrets that space has. Fiction aside, a team of astronomers has found what appears to be a large exomoon orbiting a Jupiter-like planet beyond our solar system.
What is an exomoon?
An exomoon or extrasolar moon is a moon that naturally orbits a planet outside our solar system. We can consider a moon to be any body that revolves around another and whose mass is less than the mass that is necessary for the thermonuclear fusion of Deuterium to take place.
If the sighting is confirmed by astronomers, it could mean that exomoons are as common in the universe as exoplanets and that, regardless of their size, such moons would be a feature of planetary systems. The first sighting of an exomoon occurred four years ago and is still pending confirmation. Verification of this new candidate could be just as long.
In orbit with the planet Kepler 1708 b
The discovery of the exomoon, published in Nature Astronomy , which led by David Kipping , of Columbia University, who already reported on another possible exomoon, the first ever discovered, in 2018. “Astronomers have so far found more than 10,000 candidates to exoplanets, but exomoons are much more challenging, ” says Kipping, who has spent the last decade searching for exomoons. “They are unknown land.”
“Given the abundance of moons in our solar system, it is reasonable to assume that exomoons will reside around some exoplanets, which has motivated efforts to detect them,” Kipping added.
The new extrasolar moon candidate orbits the planet Kepler 1708b, a world 5,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. An exomoon a third smaller than the Neptune-sized moon Kipping and his team previously found orbiting a Jupiter-like planet called Kepler 1605b.
How is Kepler 1708 bi
It is most likely a moon more than twice the size of Earth orbiting a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Scientists have calculated that the chances of it being an anomaly they are 1%.
“We can find no reason to reject Kepler-1708 bi as an exomoon candidate at this time, but we urge both caution and further observations.” The researchers suggest that the Hubble Space Telescope , the recently launched Webb Telescope or the European Space Telescope Project PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) could spot more lunar transits to confirm the finding.