Thursday, April 10, 2014

First Potential Exomoon

Scientists may have found an exomoon, the first one ever discovered.  If it is a moon, then the system it resides in, MOA-2011-BLG-262, is an unusual one, because it would contain only a single Jupiter-sized planet and the moon.  No star.  Rogue planets, as such objects are called, are probably fairly common in the universe, but are extremely difficult to spot because they give off very little light.

You may have noticed that scientists aren't particularly sure if this is an exomoon or not.  That's because of the way the discovery was made.  The system was discovered using gravitational microlensing, which allows discovery of objects we would normally never be able to spot, but are events that only happen once.  In this case, the event revealed that there are two objects in the system, and the orbiting object has 0.05% of the mass compared to the main object.  

The issue here is that the scientists don't know how far away the system is.  The microlensing event doesn't reveal that.  If the system is far away, then the system is a dim star orbited by a smallish gas giant.  If the system is closer, than it's a rogue Jupiter orbited by a roughly Earth-sized moon.  The data we have indicates that it is a planet and moon, but a star and planet system is more likely to occur in nature.  Unfortunately, we'll probably never know the real truth, because microlensing events only ever reveal these objects once.  And since we don't know where the object is, we won't be able to look for it.  Finding it again would constitute a complete accident. 

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