Tag Archives: exoplanet

Did Astronomers Just Find the First Moon Outside Our Solar System?

by Jacobi Posted on December 27, 2013

Jupiter’s moon Io in orbit around the gas giant. Io is casting a dark shadow on Jupiter’s atmosphere. Photo: Cassini / NASA

As ever more advanced telescopes have shown that our Earth is similar to at least 17 billion Earth-like planets, astronomers have also been looking for something else—a moon in orbit around one of these exoplanets. An exomoon. And now they might have found one.

The potential moon, says Ian O’Neill for Discovery News, is half the size of Earth and in orbit around a planet four times bigger than Jupiter.

The candidate exomoon is around 45 million kilometers (0.13 AU) from its host exoplanet. As a comparison, Jupiter’s most distant satellite (S/2003 J 2) orbits over 30 million kilometers from the gas giant, so such an extreme orbit around a larger planet is certainly feasible.

The potential discovery was announced in a preliminary research paper, says Nature, and is definitely still up for debate: “After sifting through detailed observations of this event, astronomers proposed that the intervening object could be either a smallish star with a Neptune-sized planet orbiting it, or a largish planet with a moon orbiting it.”

If the latter possibility is confirmed, it would be the first ever detection of an exomoon. The problem is that there is no way to repeat the observation and know for sure.

“It’s kind of a shame because we’ll probably never know what the answer is,” says David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard‒Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the research.

No one is really surprised by the idea of exomoons. After all, moons are incredibly common in our solar system. Yet, finding the first known exomoon would be a big discovery, so the scientists are taking the more conservative interpretation, says Discovery News.

More from Smithsonian.com:

You Can’t Throw a Rock in the Milky Way Without Hitting an Earth-Like Planet
This Is an Actual Photo of a Planet in Another Solar System

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Did Astronomers Just Find the First Moon Outside Our Solar System?

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This Baby Rogue Planet Is Wandering the Universe All by Itself

by Peggy Mason Posted on October 10, 2013

An artist’s idea of what PSO J318.5-22 may look like. Photo: MPIA/V. Ch. Quetz

Birthed from the protoplanetary disk, most planets spend their days orbiting their parent star, growing old together as they loop around their galaxy’s core. A newly discovered planet named PSO J318.5-22 (which we’ve decided to call Flapjack, because why not?) has no parent. It has no planetary siblings. The planet is adrift, alone.

Estimated to be just 12 million year old, Flapjack is, relatively, just a baby, a planetary toddler off on an adventure to explore the universe. It’s a rogue planet, and it’s sailing through space some 80 light-years away. It is, says Alan Boyle for NBC, about six times the size of Jupiter.

It’s also, say the researchers in a release, the best example we have yet of a rogue planet. Scientists have known that some big objects tend to travel alone, rather than orbiting as part of a system. But they weren’t sure whether these celestial rogues were teeny, faint stars or wandering planets. Recently, though, astronomers have been finding planets all over the universe. Comparing Flapjack to these confirmed planets gave the scientists what they needed to call it a planet.

Rogue planets, says Universe Today, may be planets that formed normally, as part of a solar system, but then were kicked out to wander alone. That’s what they think happened to Flapjack. But there’s also the possibility that rogue planets could be birthed in interstellar space, growing from cold clouds of dust and gas. If that’s the case, Flapjack, says Universe Today, could have been born free.

The red dot in the middle is a telescope’s view of PSO J318.5-22. Photo: N. Metcalfe / Pan-STARRS 1 Science Consortium

More from Smithsonian.com:

Scientists Get The Best Look Yet at a Rogue Planet With No Star

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This Baby Rogue Planet Is Wandering the Universe All by Itself

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This Is an Actual Photo of a Planet in Another Solar System

by gt67dx1 Posted on June 3, 2013

The little blue splotch is the planet HD95086 b. It’s about four or five times the mass of Jupiter and it orbits a star 300 light years away. The planet’s star doesn’t actually look like a clip art star–the astronomers had to cover the star so they could see the comparatively faint planet. Photo: European Southern Observatory

See that little blue smudge? That’s another planet.

It’s named HD95086 b, and it’s orbiting a star 300light years away. This is one of the first times in human history that we’ve ever laid eyes on a planet in another solar system, a planet that isn’t orbiting the Sun.

Thanks to the Kepler telescope we know that thousands, perhaps billions of planets exist out there in the universe. But we haven’t actually seen very many of them. Kepler found planets by looking for the absence of starlight—it registered a planet’s presence when the light from a star dipped, as a planet passed in front. Other techniques let astronomers measure the presence of a planet by calculating how the star wobbles because of the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. But this is different. The photo above is of a planet in a different solar system as seen through a telescope.

It’s really, really hard to see planets like this one directly. You need a big, advanced telescope. To see HD95086 b, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory used the Very Large Telescope. (Yes, that’s its real name.) The movement of the atmosphere, which a telescope on the ground needs to look through, can perturb the view. The Very Large Telescope is equipped with adaptive optics, a way for the instruments to account for the atmospheric distortion and clean up the image. The astronomers also used a technique to bump up the contrast so that they could see the faint planet.

According to Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, the new planet is around four or five times as big as Jupiter and orbits its star at a distance about twice the distance between the Sun and Neptune. The star itself, says Howell, is a “baby” compared to the Sun: it’s just 17 million years old, compared to our star’s 4.5 billion years.

More from Smithsonian.com:

So Long, Kepler: NASA’s Crack Exoplanet-Hunter Falls to Mechanical Failure
17 Billion Earth-Size Planets! An Astronomer Reflects on the Possibility of Alien Life

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This Is an Actual Photo of a Planet in Another Solar System

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