After Exoplanets, The First Exomoon Glimpsed?

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After exoplanets, the next frontier is exomoons around alien planets. And the first one may have been already discovered!

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Exomoon and exoplanet. Photo: Pouke.org

Already more than 1,000 exoplanets have been discovered across the solar system. Now it’s time to find moons orbiting alien planets. And some astronomers say they may have found an oddball system of a planet and a moon floating free in the galaxy rather than orbiting a star. Exciting, no?

The title of their article:

A Sub-Earth-Mass Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant Primary or a High Velocity Planetary System in the Galactic Bulge

tells everything. Is it a moon or a planetary system lost in our solar system?

The best explanation for the data is a giant planet, about four times the mass of Jupiter, orbited by a moon weighing less than Earth.  However, it could also represent a more distant system comprising a small star, around one tenth the mass of the sun, and a planet roughly 18 times as massive as Earth.

Sadly, there is no chance for astronomers to take another peek at the object to confirm their suspicions, because it has moved out of alignment with the background star and now produces no lensing signal.

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2 Comments

  1. Is there a bigger and deeper mistery than life itself? Is curiosity, indifference or boredome what searches beyond it? Anyway, is there fossils or life elsewhere? But, isn’t the emergence and maintenance of life a process of radical contingency? That is, is a unique and unrepeatable past totally necessary? Or does life emerge through space like mushrooms when some conditions are present? So, how many conditions are necessary: three, four, trillions, infinite? Only one, water or any sort of God? Is God the word that means infinite conditions, absolute necessity? Anyway, how did the life that emerge in a given conditions resist when switching to a different moment? How does life resist time itself, the effects of entropy? But, is it possible for human beings to recognise a simpler life than their own brain only? On the other hand, beyond likeness, is it possible to recognise a complex life than their brain, is this the extra-terrestrial life that some people are searching unsuccessfully? However, is there an origin of life or would it be as finding a cut in the material history of the universe, an infinite void that human language patches now? Is it the same cut between life and death? Along these lines, a different book, a preview in http://goo.gl/rfVqw6 Just another suggestion, far away from dogmas or axioms.

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