The Hubble Telescope Has Found The First Exomoon
The Hubble Space Telescope just proved its awesomeness again as it brought us evidence of the first ever moon existing outside of our Solar System.
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Three scientists – Alex Teachey, David Kipping, and Allan Schmitt published a study in which they described their search for moons near 284 exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. The result was a possibility. They found the possibility of exomoon near the exoplanet Kepler-1625 b that should be about 2.5 million far away. But they said to be careful, as they cannot confirm its existence.
And the exomoon is bigger than you might expect. The largest moon in our Solar system in Ganymede. It is about 40 % the size and 2.5 % the mass of the Earth.* Kepler-1625 b I* - as the moon is now known – is bigger than the Earth. It actually is the size of Uranus or Neptune. The planet itself is about the size of Jupiter. Scientists have previously said that such large moons might exist and if they are close to their star in the so-called Goldilocks zone life could potentially exist there.
Last year between the 28th and the 29th October we pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the star for about 40 hours in an attempt to confirm the exomoons existence. And there were two ways we could potentially detect it. The exomoon could be passing in the exact right position so it would add additional cover thus reducing the star's brightness even more than the planet itself would. The second option was available because we expected the exomoon to be quite large. If the orbit of a planet is being disrupted by another planet or moon it will result in the orbit being irregular.
And the Hubble telescope discovered both of these. The planet transited 77.8 minutes earlier than we expected it to and the brightness went down even more than it did during previous observations.
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