{"id":18333,"date":"2018-10-03T18:15:08","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T10:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/hubble-space-telescope-boosts-evidence-for-first-exomoon-seen-circling-alien-planet\/"},"modified":"2018-10-03T18:15:08","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T10:15:08","slug":"hubble-space-telescope-boosts-evidence-for-first-exomoon-seen-circling-alien-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/hubble-space-telescope-boosts-evidence-for-first-exomoon-seen-circling-alien-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble Space Telescope boosts evidence for first exomoon seen circling alien planet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Exoplanet
An artist\u2019s impression shows the Jupiter-sized exoplanet Kepler-1625b transiting its parent star with the Neptune-sized candidate exomoon in tow. (Dan Durda Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With a lot of help from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers now feel confident enough to publish their evidence for the first moon detected in orbit around a planet beyond our solar system.<\/p>\n

But they\u2019re still not completely confident.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this point, it\u2019s up to us to report what we\u2019re seeing, hand it over to the community and let the community probe it,\u201d said Columbia University astronomer Alex Teachey, one of the authors of a study about the find published in the open-access journal Science Advances. \u201cIf they see what we see, I expect some people will be convinced and other people will be skeptical. And that\u2019s all part of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reports about the exoplanet and its apparent exomoon have been circulating for more than a year, thanks in part to the Hubble data-gathering campaign. Previous observations from NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope suggested that the Jupiter-sized planet, known as Kepler-1625b, had a world about the size of Neptune in orbit around it. But there weren\u2019t enough observations to make the case conclusively.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Hubble was able to help with an extra 40 hours\u2019 worth of observations. Like Kepler, Hubble tracked the faint dimming of light from Kepler-1625, a sunlike star about 8,000 light-years from Earth, as the two worlds passed over the star\u2019s disk. The timing of the dips in the starlight \u2014 sometimes with the smaller world in the lead, and sometimes with it trailing \u2014 could be analyzed to work out the orbital mechanics behind the pair\u2019s motion.<\/p>\n

Hubble\u2019s data, along with fine-tuned data from Kepler, strengthened the case for claiming Kepler-1625b had an exomoon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve tried our best to rule out other possibilities such as spacecraft anomalies, other planets in the system or stellar activity, but we\u2019re unable to find any other single hypothesis which can explain all of the data we have,\u201d Columbia Professor David Kipping, the study\u2019s other author, told reporters during a teleconference in advance of the study\u2019s release.<\/p>\n