Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News for Students
There may be a moon the size of Neptune far out in space. It appears to be orbiting a planet in another solar system.
Such planets are known as exoplanets. So its moon would be exomoon. If it exists, this orb would challenge ideas of how moons are born.David Kipping and Alex Teachey spotted signs of the exomoon with the Hubble Space Telescope. Both astronomers work at Columbia University in New York City. The pair pointed the telescope on the star Kepler 1625. Then it watched the star for 40 hours on October 28 and 29, 2017. Earlier, the Kepler space telescope had shown this star had a Jupiter-sized planet. It orbited its sun every 287 days. Scientists spotted the planet from dips in starlight reaching the telescope. Those dips were a darkening of starlight as the planet transited — passed in front of — the star.
But Teachey and Kipping saw something else in the Kepler data: signs of a second dimming. It happened either before or after the planet’s transit. And that second dimming is exactly what astronomers would expect if an exomoon were orbiting the planet.
The astronomers named this possible…
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