What Even Is A Moon The third wheel that might be the first exomoon
Exomoon candidate - a Jupiter-sized object circling a brown dwarf could be the first moon found outside our solar system, if it even counts as one.
Luitpold-Alexander Zollorsch
@luitpold.me
First exomoon in sight, maybe. A team on ESO’s VLT clocked a Jupiter-sized object circling a brown dwarf that circles a red dwarf star. The catch: it’s massive enough to be a planet in its own right, but it’s orbiting something that orbits a star. Lead author says being ‘the third wheel’ is what makes them want to call it a moon – so in the paper they hedged and wrote ‘exosatellite,’ because nobody’s written the rulebook for this yet. We named everything for one tidy solar system, and the cosmos never signed off on the terms. Confirmation waits on the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, online 2029. Spektrum has the writeup (German).
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