It's a massive moon the size of Neptune, and it circles a planet 10 times more massive than our own Jupiter.
As we reported recently, scientists just discovered the first ever confirmed exomoon 4,000 light years from Earth. It’s a huge discovery as it’s the first time a moon has been spotted outside of our solar system, and with 3,000 exoplanets discovered, it’s been a long time coming. But the details of this moon are what’s truly fascinating.
It’s absolutely huge, the size of Neptune, one of the biggest planets in our solar system. And the planet it circles is even more massive. While it’s the size of Jupiter, it has 10 times the mass. The exomoon has been named Kepler 1625b, and was discovered by the Kepler and Hubble space telescopes.
It’s a major discovery that could lead to further breakthroughs in astronomical discoveries outside of our solar system, and could help us understand the secrets of planetary systems and even galaxies themselves form.
The following is an excerpt from the paper, titled On the Dearth of Galilean Analogs in Kepler, and the Exomoon Candidate Kepler-1625B and published by A. Teachey, D.M. Kipping, and A.R. Schmitt.
Exomoons represent an outstanding challenge in modern astronomy, with the potential to provide rich insights into planet formation theory and habitability. In this work, we stack the phase-folded transits of 284 viable moon hosting Kepler planetary candidates, in order to search for satellites. These planets range from Earth-to-Jupiter sized and from 0.1-to-1.0AU in separation – so-called \warm” planets. Our data processing includes two-pass harmonic detrending, transit timing variations, model selection and careful data quality vetting to produce a grand light curve with a r.m.s. of 5.1 ppm.
We find that the occurrence rate of Galilean-analog moon systems can be constrained to be < 0:38 to 95% confidence for the 284 KOIs considered, with a 68.3% confidence interval of = 0:16+0:13 0:10. A single-moon model of variable size and separation locates a slight preference for a population of Super-Ios, 0:5R moons orbiting at 5-10 planetary radii. However, we stress that the low Bayes factor of just 2 in this region means it should be treated as no more than a hint at this time. Splitting our data into various physically-motivated subsets reveals no strong signal. The dearth of Galileananalogs around warm planets places the first strong constraint on exomoon formation models to date.
Finally, we report evidence for an exomoon candidate Kepler-1625b-i, which we brie y describe ahead of scheduled observations of the target with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Moons present unique scientific opportunities. In our Solar System, they oer clues to the mechanisms driving early and late planet formation, and several of them are thought to be promising targets in the search for life, as several are rich in volatiles (e.g. Squyres et al. 1983; Hansen et al. 2006) and possess internal heating mechanisms (e.g. Morabito et al. 1979; Hansen et al. 2005; Sparks et al. 2016). The moons of our Solar System also demonstrate the great variety of geological features that may be found on other terrestrial worlds.
In this new era of exoplanetary science it stands to reason that moons in extrasolar systems, so-called exomoons, should tell us a great deal about the commonality of the processes that shaped our Solar System and may yield just as many surprises as their host planets before them. Just as the study of exoplanets has complicated our picture of planetary formation by revealing (for example) the existence of Hot Jupiters (Mayor & Queloz 1995) { worlds without Solar System analogs { so too might moons show us what else is possible and uproot conventional thinking about satellite formation mechanisms.
Galilean-sized moons ( 0:2-0:4R) are generally thought to be able to form in a variety of ways. For the regular satellites of Jupiter, the Galilean moons are thought to have condensed out of a circumplanetary disk, akin to planet formation within a protoplanetary disk (Canup & Ward 2002). This process is expected to limit regular satellites to a cumulative mass of O[10 4] that of the primary (Canup &Ward 2006). Higher massratio moons, such as the Earth’s Moon, are evidently viable too and may form from catastrophic collisions in the first few hundred million years of the solar system, coalescing from that collision’s debris (e.g. Ida et al. 1997). Finally, retrograde Triton is hypothesized to have originated from a captures via a binary exchange mechanism (Agnor & Hamilton 2006). Put together, Galilean-sized satellites appear to have formed via at least three independent pathways within the Solar System, and their existence around exoplanets can therefore be reasonably hypothesized.
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