In what would be a somewhat major discovery , astronomer say they may have found the first synodic month beyond the Solar System – know as an exomoon .
The potential find is 4,000 light - years away around a genius called Kepler-1625 . It was made using NASA ’s Kepler Space Telescope by three astronomers , Alex Teachey and David Kipping from Columbia University , and a citizen scientist called Allan Schmitt .
They published their results in a composition available onarXiv , and submitted to journal for review .
If it turns out to be veridical , the exomoon is mean to be about the mass of Neptune and revolve a satellite that ’s about 10 times the slew of Jupiter but the same size .
The signal observed by the uranologist was a twofold plunge in the star ’s light as the major planet , and then the moon , snuff it in front relative to us – known as the transportation method .
The uranologist have pronounce they ’re confident it ’s a lunar month to a level of about 4.1 sigma . This means if the moonshine is not real , there ’s about a one in 16,000 probability of construe such a sign again , asNew Scientistpoints out .
While it await pretty safe at the here and now , we ca n’t say for certain . presently , the sign is merely uniform with what we ’d expect to see from a synodic month , but it could be something else . Now , they ’ll use the Hubble Space Telescope in October to try and support the finding .
“ Until we get the measurements from Hubble , it may as well be 50 - 50 in my judgment , " Kipping toldBBC News .
The find would be similar to the first planet found outside the Solar System in 1992 . Although we were passably certain such exoplanets survive , finding one proved difficult .
And that ’s even more true for moons , which tend to be smaller than regular planets . This particular system seems almost like a binary major planet system , and it would certainly be unlike anything we ’ve seen before .
We ’ve had quite a few false alarms about exomoons before . There was one backin 2014 , for lesson , that looked promising at first , but was presently rule out . Whether this late discovery will stand up to scrutiny remains to be pick up , but it would be fairly exciting if so .
A circumstances of the 3,000 or so exoplanets we ’ve found so far have been nothing like any humankind in our Solar System . Some are Jupiter - alike in muckle but electron orbit incredibly nearly , while others are rocky worlds in uninhabitable orbits . Whether exomoons will force a exchangeable rethink , well , we ’ll have to wait to find out .
