Huge Cosmic Discovery Challenges What Defines A Moon
For ages, astronomers have categorized the skies into tidy buckets: stars, planets, and moons. However, a new object 71 light-years from us could completely disrupt that thinking.
A team of astronomers led by Kevin Hoy of Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has detected the first known "exosatellite," a world roughly the mass of Jupiter orbiting a brown dwarf, which itself circles a small star. The discovery, published in the Nature journal, in the CD-35 2722 system gives scientists their first concrete look at a world in a triple-tiered nested orbit: an object circling a secondary host that is, in turn, circling a central star.
The find instantly reopens a debate over astronomical nomenclature. While our solar system hosts nearly 900 cataloged moons, finding one outside our neighborhood has so far eluded detection. Distant worlds are usually spotted when they cross in front of their host...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hothardware.com. To see the full text click HERE
