It may not look anything like Avatar ’s Pandora or Jedi ’s Endor , but if verified , it could be the first moon ever discovered outside our solar system . Located 1,800 light years away , it ’s a prominent lunar month revolve a satellite four sentence the size of Jupiter . But strangely , the distich is n’t even remotely stuffy to a star .
Top figure of speech : Pandora from Avatar .
To make the discovery , David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame , Indiana , and colleagues used a proficiency that ’s not often used to discover exoplanets . It ’s called gravitative microlensing , an opthalmic phenomenon where light emanating from a aloof objective gets falsify and distended by the gravity of another nearby object . This warp can create a magnification effect , making heavenly objects , like planet and galaxies , easier to find . And now , owe to this late discovery , it can also help us encounter Sun Myung Moon as well .
Back in 2011 , Bennett ’s team spotted a microlensing issue that amplify the luminance of a wizard by a factor of 70 times . An hour afterwards they remark a 2d outcome , this one much smaller . The astronomers interpreted this as a large aim passing in front of the star , follow by a smaller one .
They posited two account : Either it ’s a lunar month orbiting a planet , or it ’s a brown dwarf ( a kind of satellite that does n’t have quite what it take to be a star ) orbited by a Neptune - mass major planet . But after performing Bayesian calculations on the datum , the astronomers had to allow in that the “ most likely ” account is the planet / moon possibility .
If the system consists of a planet and a lunation , however , it ’s a strange one , indeed . First , the distich is undirected in space . The star that was used to observe the microlensing event is far , far away . Now , rogue planetsdo live , but if confirmed this would be the first one discovered to have a moon ; and in fact , this twosome might actually be two planet that were discharge from a riotous star arrangement , likely a binary system . That enjoin , this observation would seem to add credenza to the brown dwarf theory — but the concentrated information suggests otherwise .
https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-say-theyve-found-a-rogue-planet-with-no-su-1443571329
Second , the moon , which is about half the size of Earth ( which is immense by Sun Myung Moon standard ) , orbits its host major planet at an extreme distance — about 20 million kilometre out . Contrast this with Jupiter ’s large moon , Ganymede , which is about 1 million kilometers out .
Sadly , we may never learn the truth . gravitative microlensing does n’t lend itself very well for detecting repetition consequence .
Read the entire study at arXiv : “ A Sub - Earth - Mass Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant Primary or a High Velocity Planetary System in the Galactic Bulge . ”
AstronomymoonsScienceSpace
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