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A second exomoon outside our solar system may have been discovered by a team of American astronomers.
giant moon – about 2.6 times larger than Earth —was discovered orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet known as Kepler 1708b, located 5,500 light-years from Earth. This is only the second discovered celestial body that could be an exomoon.. A new discovery was published this Thursday in the magazine Astronomy of nature.
Both possible moons outside our solar system have been discovered by a team of astronomers led by David Kipping., Associate Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University in the United States of America. The first Neptune-sized satellite was discovered orbiting the giant exoplanet Kepler-1625b in 2018.
To date, astronomers have discovered more than 10,000 exoplanet candidates, but exomoons are harder to find“, – said the scientist, whose words are quoted by CNN.
The discovery of more exomoons will allow astronomers to understand how they formed, whether they can support life and whether they play an important role in the potential habitability of planets. There are quite a lot of them in our solar system with over 200 moons, but astronomers have struggled to find more distant natural satellites.
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This is because many exoplanets have been discovered using a method that looks for gaps in the light coming from other stars in our universe. evidence that a planet passed in front of a star. However, exomoons, being smaller bodies, create smaller gaps, making them difficult to observe.
Like the first exomoon discovered, the second will gaseous natural satellite, which explains its gigantic size, and both are far from the star of the system in which they are located.
There are three theories for the formation of moons. First, they were part of the planet they were orbiting, and that they separated due to the collision of the planet with another celestial body. The second theory indicates that satellites are in fact planets that were attracted by the gravity of bodies revolving around. A third theory suggests that they formed from gas and dust that orbited a star in your system, which later merged to form a natural satellite.
