The Milky Way must be completely full of moons when we think about it.

However, although we have so far confirmed 5,000 exoplanets, the exomons are still in short supply. A temporary discovery was made in 2017; Now, there is a second filter to add to the panel.

Named the Kepler-1708 Pi, the Candidate Exomon orbits an exoplanet orbiting a star about 5,500 light-years away. The evidence so far is that it is very large – about 2.6 times the size of Earth and gaseous.

The Kepler-1625 pie, located about 8,000 light-years from the size and mass of Neptune (probably gas), is similar to Exomun’s first candidate and orbits the Exoplanet many times more than Jupiter’s mass. Both the candidates for the outer moon and their outer planets orbit their stars at great distances.

“Astronomers have so far discovered more than 10,000 extraterrestrials, but exomons pose the greatest challenge,” said David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. Any survey is generally bizarre. Great discoveries can be easily made with our limited sensitivity. “

The Exomune candidate was revealed during a search for data collected by the Kepler space telescope.

Kepler’s mission is to search for extraterrestrials. This is difficult because the exoplanets are so small and dim that most of the time they cannot be seen directly; You should try to find her by looking at the very small effects she has on her host stars.

In Kepler’s case, staring at the stars, looking for dim, regular slopes in brightness, means that something is moving at a constant distance between us and the star – in other words, an asteroid orbiting the solar system. These very dim tips are known as unstable light curves.

In data from Kepler and later Hubble, the researchers identified a faint signal and the exoplanet’s transport curve of the Kepler-1625 bag. They then went back to the data and searched for these signals.

They analyzed Kepler data for 70 exoplanets. Only one asteroid, Kepler-1625 b, matched Exomon’s signal; But researchers say that’s just what’s happening.

The Kepler-1708 bi, like its predecessor, is not yet confirmed; In fact, some astronomers have argued that the Kepler-1625 pie is a trace of an exomon, instead suggesting that it is an artifact of signal data reduction.

To avoid repeating such criticisms, this time the researchers calculated the probability that the Kepler-1708 bi-signal would be an artifact; And only 1% said.

We do not know how a giant gas spacecraft and extrasolar system formed; Since there is no such thing in the solar system, this indicates that the formation process is different from that of the moons here.

It will take more work to find them; The revelation will also confirm whether or not it is actually exomona. At the very least, follow-up observations will be needed to see if another instrument can detect the signal. But the only way to confirm the discovery of outer moons is to discover many things that can no longer challenge their existence.

The group’s study has been published in the journal Natural astronomy.

Source: Scientific warning

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