FINDING THE FIRST EXOMOON
Moons are found all throughout the Solar System. In fact, there are 184 known moons orbiting the 13 planets and dwarf planets, with just over 70 per cent of them orbiting the two gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. If you apply the same figures to the latest known exoplanet count – 3,972 at the time of writing – for a rough estimate, there could be a potential number of at least 55,000 moons outside our Solar System, also known as exomoons. This is a staggering number, but it also raises a question: why hasn’t an exomoon been discovered yet?
“Testing a hypothesis rigorously is part of science, and I'd be uncomfortable frankly if people simply took us at our word that this moon is real” Alex Teachey
Discoveries regarding exoplanets have been at the forefront of astronomy for the last two decades and have produced some of the most headline-generating space news of recent times. But another recent piece of news has generated equally exciting headlines, as astronomers claim to have made the first-ever detection of an exomoon. Two
