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The search for exomoons orbiting planets outside our solar system has sparked a significant debate within the astronomical community, involving a pair of contrasting studies that presented divergent viewpoints on the existence of exomoons Kepler-1625b-i and Kepler-1708b-i. Much like Schrödinger’s oddball cat that is both dead and alive inside a box, we won’t really know until someone goes and looks. But in a new paper recently uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, a team of astronomers led by David Kipping from Columbia University takes issue with the drama surrounding the ongoing exomoon search. A DISCOVERY GETS DASHED In 2017, Kipping,...

Eliminate the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes once said, and the truth, no matter how improbable, lies in whatever remains. Good advice for detectives — and, it turns out, for astronomers. Astronomy is often little more than piecing together scattered clues, carefully eliminating possibilities and arriving at an improbable truth. Take, for example, the announcement of an exomoon discovery back in 2017. Observations seemed to show the presence of large moon, one as big as Neptune, orbiting a gas giant in a distant solar system. But, as the authors of the announcement were careful to state, the discovery was far from...

The hunt for moons outside our solar system has just turned up another possible lunar world, a moon bigger than Earth that's orbiting a Jupiter-like planet. The planet and its moon — if it really is a moon — orbit a Sun-like star that's over 5,000 light years away, according to a report in the journal Nature Astronomy. "The moon is pretty alien compared to any moon in the solar system," says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. "We're not sure if it's rocky, we're not sure if it's gaseous. It's kind of in between the size of Neptune,...

While astronomers keenly await the discovery of Earth-like planets around other stars, the possibility of habitable moons should not be ruled out either, say scientists at University College London. NASA's Kepler spacecraft launched earlier this year with the hunt for Earth-like planets the primary goal of the mission. It will make detections using the transit method – by looking for the characteristic dips in stellar brightness as a planet passes in front of its parent star.

In March, NASA launched its Kepler telescope with the hopes of discovering an Earth-like planet that could be hospitable to extraterrestrial life. However, one team of scientists has gone as far to say that the orbiting telescope will likely discover habitable "exomoons" as well. Writing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr David Kipping and colleagues of University College London created a detailed method that scientists would need to follow while looking for exomoons. However, many experts were unable to tell if the technology needed to detect these exomoons even existed. Kipping's team created a model of...