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Giant object could be an 'exomoon' more than twice the size of Earth - CNN
Jan 13, 2022 1 min, 13 secs
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It's only the second space object discovered that may be an exomoon, or a moon outside of our solar system.

Spotting moons, which are smaller and cause even more diminutive dips in starlight, is extra difficult.

To find this second potential moon, Kipping and his team used data from NASA's retired planet-hunting Kepler mission to survey some of the coldest gas giant exoplanets the telescope found.

It's possible that both exomoon candidates started out as planets that were eventually dragged into orbit around larger planets like Kepler 1625b and Kepler 1708b.

Giant moons are likely an anomaly

Kipping believes it's unlikely that all moons outside of our solar system are as large as these two candidates, which may make them the oddballs, rather than the standard.

Meanwhile, Kipping and his team continue to gather evidence in support of the exomoons.

The fact that each associated planet takes longer than one Earth year to complete an orbit around its star slows the process of discovery.

"Confirmation requires seeing the moon transits repeat multiple times," Kipping said.

"The long-period nature of our target planets means that we only have two transits in hand here, just not enough to see a series of moon transits necessary to claim a confirmed detection."

If they are confirmed, it could be the beginning of a new acceptance that exomoons are as common as exoplanets outside of our solar system.

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