Many years ago, David Kipping, when he lived in London, would walk home through the city and look up at the moon. For astronomers, its dimly glowing presence was a nightly source of inspiration. “It reminded us that satellites are waiting for us around exoplanets,” he says. “It made sense that we should look for them.”
It would be exciting to discover an exomoon, a natural satellite of a world outside our solar system. First, the moon may play a key role in determining the habitability of its host planet by dampening its wobble and promoting a stable climate, in the same way it did for Earth. There may also be strange and wonderful configurations, such as a lunar ring or a moon with its own moon. But the most interesting thing is that some of them may be more suitable for life than exoplanets.
Kipping, now at Columbia University in New York, is part of a small community of astronomers exploring solar moons. At least statistics are on your side. About 5,500 exoplanets have been discovered so far, some of which may have dozens of moons. The problem is that it’s not easy to prove their existence. Two previous sightings of Kipping have been hotly debated.
But now there’s hope on the horizon, with many new ways to explore these objects, from monitoring rogue planets that have abandoned their stars to monitoring exoplanets’ gravitational wobbles. Armed with these new technologies, and with new telescopes also in development, the Moon will…
Source: www.newscientist.com
