YEARS in the past, when David Kipping lived in London, he would stroll dwelling by means of the metropolis and lookup at the moon. As an astronomer, its faintly glowing presence served as a nightly supply of inspiration. “It was a reminder that moons were waiting for us around exoplanets,” he says. “It just made sense that we should look for them.”
Finding exomoons – pure satellites of worlds past our photo voltaic system – could be thrilling. For a begin, they could play a key position in figuring out the habitability of host planets by damping their wobbles, fostering a secure local weather in the similar means that our moon has executed for Earth. They may additionally are available strange configurations, equivalent to rings of moons and moons with their very own moons. But most excitingly, it’s potential that a few of them are extra hospitable to life than exoplanets.
Kipping, now at Columbia University in New York, is a part of a small neighborhood of astronomers who search for exomoons. The statistics, not less than, are on their aspect: we now have discovered some 5500 exoplanets thus far, and a few of these might have dozens of moons. The bother is, proving their existence isn’t simple. The two sightings Kipping has made thus far are hotly disputed.
But now, hope is on the horizon, with a bunch of latest methods to go looking for these objects – from watching rogue planets which have deserted their stars to monitoring the gravitational wobbles of exoplanets. Armed with these new methods, and with new telescopes on the means, the moon…