Columbia University astronomers discover giant moon 5,500 light years away
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Astronomers at Columbia University have announced the discovery of a second supermoon orbiting a Jupiter-sized exoplanet. This is reported in an article published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A giant exomoon orbits the planet Kepler 1708b, which lies 5,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It is about a third smaller than the Neptune-sized moon that the team of scientists discovered earlier in orbit around another gas giant, Kepler 1625b.
Both exomoons are likely composed of gas that is held together by gravitational attraction. They may have originally been planets that entered orbit around an even larger gas giant. Such systems are far from parent stars that could tear them apart.
Observations from other space telescopes, such as Hubble, will be required to confirm the discovery made by the transit method, when the brightness of a star decreases due to the passage of an object in its background. Some experts believe that scientists stumbled upon a fluctuation in the data due to the star or errors in the instruments.
