The hunt is on for exomoons around alien planets and scientists may have just found one
By Meghan Bartels published about 9 hours ago
The find, the second candidate for an exomoon, may be the next big thing in astronomy.
An artist's depiction of an exomoon orbiting exoplanet Kepler 1708 b. (Image credit: Helena Valenzuela
Widerström)
It's time for another tantalizing glimpse of what alien solar systems might look like.
Astronomers have announced the possible detection of an exomoon, or a moon in another stellar system from our own, the second such candidate observation to date. The signal comes from a star studied by NASA's now-retired Kepler space telescope, and scientists behind the new research say that their analysis points to a mini-Neptune moon orbiting a planet about the size of Jupiter. If the strange signal does turn out to represent an exomoon, the discovery would give scientists a new understanding of not just this stellar system, but of how such systems work across the galaxy more generally.
"These are objects that everybody suspected would be there, but there wasn't a lot of formal research on it before 2007," Marialis Rosario-Franco, an astrophysicist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico who studies exomoons but was not involved in the new research, told Space.com.
"Exolunar science, it's still quite a young field that is brimming with possibilities," she added. "This is something that we are just starting to conceive that we might be able to observe — and we are not directly observing these objects; we are simply observing the perturbation that the presence of those objects have in an otherwise normal exoplanet signal."
More:
https://www.space.com/exomoon-candidate-kepler-1708-discovery
= new reply since forum marked as read
I was going to make some suggestions on where (in the republikan caucus) they could look.....
Never mind...... 