Surprisingly, the first discovered alien moon is large and gaseous.

Surprisingly, the first discovered alien moon is large and gaseous. https://www.eresviral.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sorprendentemente-la-primera-luna-alienígena-descubierta-es-grande-y-gaseosa

Surprisingly, the first discovered alien moon is large and gaseous.







WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have identified what appears to be the first moon detected outside our solar system, a large gaseous world the size of Neptune that is unlike any other known moon and orbits a gas planet much more massive than Jupiter. 











This image published on October 2, 2018 shows an artistic impression of the exoplanet Kepler-1625b, in transit through the star, with the exomoon recently discovered on its back. Courtesy of Dan Durda / Handout through REUTERS   





The discovery, detailed by the researchers on Wednesday, was a surprise, and not because it showed that moons exist elsewhere, they felt it was only a matter of time before one was found in another star system. Instead, they were amazed at how different this moon was from the approximately 180 known in our solar system. 

"It's big and weird by solar system standards," said Columbia University astronomy professor David Kipping on the moon, known as the exomoon because it's outside our solar system.  

The moons of our solar system are rocky or icy objects. The newly discovered exomoon and the planet on which it orbits, which is estimated to be several times the mass of the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, are gaseous, an unexpected pairing. They are located 8,000 light years from Earth. 

Kipping and study co-author Alex Teachey, a graduate student at Columbia, said his observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Kepler Space Telescope provided the first clear evidence of an exomoon, but other observations should be used. Hubble next May to confirm the finding. 

The exomoon is exponentially larger than the largest moon in our solar system. The moon Ganymede of Jupiter has a diameter of approximately 3,270 miles (5,260 km). The exomoon is estimated to be about the size of Neptune, the smallest of the four gaseous planets in our solar system, with a diameter of approximately 30,600 miles (49,000 km). 

The exomoon and its planet orbit Kepler-1625, a star similar in temperature to our sun but 70% larger. The exomoon orbits approximately 1.9 million miles (3 million km) of its planet. The mass of the exomoon is approximately 1.5 percent that of your planet. 

Kipping and Teachey relied on the "transit" method already used by researchers to discover almost 4,000 planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. They observed a drop in the brightness of Kepler-1625 when the planet and then the exomoon passed in front of him. 

The size and gaseous composition of the exomoon defy current theories about the formation of the moon. 

"It could be argued that because larger objects are easier to detect than smaller ones, this is really the fruit that hangs lower, so it might not be entirely unexpected that the first exomoon detection is among the as large as possible, "Teachey said. 

The findings were published in the journal Science Advances. 





Will Dunham report; Edited by Sandra Maler





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