A signal has been detected by the Kepler Space Telescope that may well be the first moon we have ever discovered outside of our solar system. It was picked up by David Kipping and his colleagues at Columbia University, who remain speculative. Kipping told New Scientist, “It is consistent with the signal that we might expect from a moon, but it might be consistent with other things as well.”
[video=youtube;egDi7rZxYHY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egDi7rZxYHY[/video]
Kepler finds cosmic bodies by measuring their disruption of light as they cross the path between us and distant stars. The team detected the dips that indicated the moon over three orbits of a planet in the star system called “Kepler-1625.” They graded the exomoon’s likelihood at four sigma — which means that the probability of seeing the same data if the moon did not exist is roughly one in 16,000.
However, if it is indeed a moon, it would be a cosmic anomaly, as the team states that it is roughly the size of Neptune and orbiting a planet the size of Jupiter. On the other hand, as David Waltham at the University of London, said to New Scientist, “It would be pretty odd that there are hundreds of moons in the solar system but none anywhere else.”
Also, it may be that the first exomoons we detect will have to be relatively large ones, as smaller moons will likely cause blips in the data that are too small for us to detect yet. In this case, we are attempting to distinguish patterns in the faint light from a star that is 4,000 light-years away.
Sign up with Google
