At the last Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, I was part of a session on biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres that highlighted how careful we have to be before declaring we have found life. Given that, as Alex Tolley points out below, our own planet has been...
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The Likelihood of Massive Exomoons
Are there large moons -- perhaps Earth-sized or even bigger -- around gas giant planets in habitable zones somewhere in the Milky Way? It’s a wonderful thought given how it multiplies the opportunities for life to find a foothold even in systems much different from...
Exomoons: Rare in Inner Stellar Systems?
Exomoons -- moons around planets in other star systems -- are an exhilarating and at the same time seemingly inevitable prospect. There is little reason to assume our Solar System is unique in its menagerie of moons, with the gas giants favoring us particularly with...
Inconstant Moons: A New Lunar Origin Scenario
A recent snowfall followed by warming temperatures produced a foggy night recently, one in which I was out for my usual walk and noticed a beautiful Moon trying to break through the fog layers. The scene was silvery, almost surreal, the kind of thing my wife would...
Evening Landscape with Exomoons
I often work out my thoughts on the topics we discuss here while taking long walks. I try to get in five miles a day but more often it’s about three. In any case, these long, reflective walks identify me as the neighborhood eccentric, an identity that is confirmed by...
Exoplanetology Beyond Kepler
Useful synergies continue to emerge among our instruments as we ponder the future of exoplanet studies. Consider the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars). Operating from the L2 Lagrangian point, PLATO will use 34...
Pluto’s Circumbinary Moons
Kepler-47 is an eclipsing binary some 4900 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cygnus. It's a system containing two transiting circumbinary planets, meaning the planets orbit around the binary pair rather than around one or the other star....
Exomoons: A Data Search for the Orbital Sampling Effect and the Scatter Peak
Exomoons continue to be elude us, though they're under intense study. One detection strategy is called Orbital Sampling Effect, as explained in the article below. I'll let Michael Hippke describe it, but the intriguing fact is that we can work with these methods using...
Large Exomoons Shown to Be Detectable
The search for sub-planetary scale features in other solar systems continues, with encouraging news from the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project. A moon around a distant exoplanet is a prize catch, but as we’ve also seen recently, scientists are weighing the...
Searching for Exoplanet Rings
Not long ago we looked at the discovery of what appears to be a disk orbiting the huge gas giant J1407b (see Enormous Ring System Hints of Exomoons). The example of Saturn is one thing that makes us wonder whether rings might exist around exoplanets, but of course in...