[space] Astronomers may have detected the first confirmed exomoon ever found

[ForumPhantom38]

Wired has a piece on what might be the first confirmed exomoon ever detected, and given how many false alarms and disputed candidates weve had over the years this one actually looks like it has real legs behind it

The candidate orbits a body called CD-35 2722, roughly 71 light years away, discovered using the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the paper was led by a team including Kevin Hoy and Alice Zurlo and published in Nature, which already puts it on more solid footing than a lot of previous exomoon claims that got walked back after further scrutiny

Whats genuinely strange about this system is that the object the moon orbits isnt really a planet in the traditional sense, its massive, several times the mass of Jupiter, sitting right in that blurry zone between a giant planet and a brown dwarf, and the moon itself is huge too, at least as massive as Jupiter itself, which is an enormous satellite by any planetary system standard we have direct experience with

Study co-author Alice Zurlo made a point of highlighting just how much this system challenges our usual definitions, saying we have a clear delineation between planets and the sun in our own solar system so defining things like moons is simple, but in this system the lines between stars, planets and moons all blur together and the whole thing becomes much harder to describe cleanly

This ties into a broader story of near misses in exomoon hunting, theres a separate paper out of the Paris Observatory using a totally different technique called astrometry that found a potential exomoon candidate around HD 206893 B, a brown dwarf about 133 light years away, though that one is described as needing confirmation from other astronomers before its taken as settled

Given how many thousands of exoplanets weve confirmed compared to zero confirmed exomoons until now, this feels like a genuinely significant milestone even with the semantic debate over what exactly to call the object at the center of it all

Astronomers Have Detected an Exomoon for the First Timewww.wired.com

[ShawnMichaels_99]

The fact that even the researchers are struggling to define whether this thing is a moon, a planet, or something in between is honestly the most fascinating part of this whole story