What has eluded detection so far have been exosatellites: moons orbiting those remote planets. Our solar system is home to a whopping 891 moons, but the rest of the known cosmos? Nothing. Until now.
The moon is huge—at least as massive as Jupiter, which is itself the largest planet in our solar system with a diameter 11 times that of Earth. And the planet that exosatellite orbits isn’t a planet at all. Rather it’s a brown dwarf, a gassy object far too big to be a conventional planet—in this case 33 times the mass of Jupiter—but too small to ignite its nuclear furnace and become a star.
Exoplanets typically aren’t spotted visually, since the pinpoint light of the distant world is swamped by the glare of the nearby star—a little like a moth fluttering invisibly next to a street light. Rather they are discovered in one of two indirect ways. The first is known as the transit method. When an orbiting planet passes in front of its parent star, it blocks a bit of the star’s light. The dimming is exceedingly tiny—the equivalent of removing one light bulb from a board containing 10,000 of them—but it’s enough for a sensitive telescope to detect. The greater the dimming the greater the diameter of the planet. The second means of detecting an exoplanet is known as the radial velocity method: looking for the tiny wobble the moving planet’s gravity causes in the star. The greater the wobble, the greater the planet’s mass.
What does the discovery of an exomoon teach us about the universe?
“Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon,” said Hoy in a statement that accompanied the release of the study, “even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”
“It's hard to say what we will learn from this one particular system,” says Hoy, “because we don't know if it's common for high-mass systems to look like this, or if it's a weird case among more comparable systems.”
“That will be an enormous boon to the search for exomoons,” says Hoy, “as we'll have much better access to known exoplanet systems and be able to discover new ones [by] applying the same method we used here.”
The deeper astronomers look into the universe the more curious it becomes. Solar system CD-35 2772, with its mammoth exosatellite is not the first example of that—and it surely won’t be the last.
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