Three times the size of the Earth: astronomers have discovered a mysterious cosmic body

by time news

Astronomers may have found a moon that is completely different from anything in our solar system. According to CNN, this is only the second discovered space object, which may be an exomoon or a moon outside our solar system. A giant moon has been discovered orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet called Kepler 1708b, located 5,500 light-years from Earth.

A study detailing these results was published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The recently discovered celestial body is 2.6 times the size of the Earth. There is no analogue of such a large moon in our system. For reference: our own Moon is 3.7 times smaller than the Earth, CNN notes.

This is the second time that David Kipping, assistant professor of astronomy and head of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, and his team have found a candidate for the right to be called an exomoon. They discovered in 2018 the first Neptune-sized moon orbiting a giant exoplanet called Kepler-1625b.

“To date, astronomers have found more than 10,000 exoplanet candidates, but exomoons are far more complex,” David Kipping said in a statement. “They are terra incognita.”

Studying more moons, how they form, whether they can support life and whether they play a role in the potential habitability of planets could lead to a better understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve, CNN explains.

David Kipping and his team are still working to confirm that the first candidate they found is actually an exomoon.

Moons are common in our solar system, which has over 200 natural satellites, but long searches for interstellar moons have largely proved inconclusive. Astronomers have been successful in detecting exoplanets around stars outside of our solar system, but exomoons are harder to spot due to their smaller size.

Over 4,000 confirmed exoplanets have been found in the galaxy, but that doesn’t mean finding them was easy. Many of these have been discovered using the transit method or looking for gaps in starlight as a planet passes in front of its star. Detecting moons that are smaller and cause even smaller dips in starlight is very difficult.

To find this second potential moon, Kipping and his team used data from NASA’s Kepler Planet Search mission to explore some of the coldest gas giant exoplanets the telescope has detected. The researchers used this criterion in their searches because in our solar system, the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have the most satellites orbiting them.

Of the 70 planets they examined, only one detected an accompanying signal, which turned out to be a moon, with only a 1% chance that it was something else.

The newly discovered candidate bears a resemblance to the first potential discovery of an exomoon. Both are likely gaseous, which explains their huge size, and they are far from their host stars.

There are three main theories about how moons form. First, when large space objects collide and the ejected material becomes the moon. Another is capture, where objects are captured and put into orbit around a large planet such as Neptune’s moon Triton, which is thought to be a captured Kuiper belt object. And third, the moons are formed from materials such as gas and dust orbiting the stars that created the planets in the early days of the solar system.

It is possible that both exomoon candidates started as planets that were eventually put into orbit around larger planets such as Kepler 1625b and Kepler 1708b.

David Kipping considers it unlikely that all moons outside our solar system are as large as these two candidates, which could make them the exception rather than the standard.

Follow-up observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023 will be needed to confirm that the two candidates are exomoons. Meanwhile, Kipping and his team continue to gather evidence to support the exomoon.

The fact that it takes more than one Earth year for each associated planet to orbit its star slows the discovery process.

“It requires multiple repetitions of moon transits to confirm,” says Kipping. “The long-period nature of our target planets means we only have two transits here, not enough to see the series of lunar transits needed to confirm a detection.”

If they are confirmed, this could be the start of a new recognition that exomoons are just as common as exoplanets outside our solar system.

The first exoplanet was only discovered in the 1990s, CNN recalls. “These planets are alien compared to our home system,” says Kipping. “But they revolutionized our understanding of how planetary systems form.”

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