#34 Solo Episode - We Need to Talk About That "First Exomoon" Discovery

So, okay, in astronomy...

The first of anything is always a big deal.

First exoplanet, the first black hole, the first pulsar, all those huge discoveries.

I don't think exomoon will ever be quite, you know, Nobel Prize winning level of importance.

It's not that important, let's be honest, but it is important.

It is a really important type of object to find a moon around a planet, around a star.

That's what we mean by an exomoon.

And to date, we just don't really have any strong, I don't know how to call this, like slam dunk detections.

We have numerous candidates at this point.

In my team, we actually found a couple of candidates using the transit method.

So that's when a planet passes in front of the star.

If it has moons, there'll be moons that also pass in front of the star.

And as it does so, it will block out a little bit of that light from the star and we can look for those dips and detect moons.

So there's two exomoon candidates that we have found using that method.

But recently there's been all sorts of other methods coming out for finding moons and that's sort of the focus of today's episode because there was this claim around, I'm just gonna call it CD35B, has a long license plate number, but we're just gonna shorten it.

And the authors, I think, shorten it to CD35B when they talk about it.

And it is the claim of really the first exomoon, the first like legit, we are here, it's happening exomoon.

So that would be a super big deal.

But at the same time this announcement was made, there was immediately a lot of questions about whether this actually qualifies as an exomoon.

Like what is an exomoon? Is it a satellite? Is it a planet? Is it something else? Like what really is this? And you'll see why as we talk about this object.

So lots to talk about.

So I'm going to start with a couple of health warnings.

I think I have to give some health warnings.

As many of you know, who are regular followers of Cool Worlds, this subject, exomoons, is something I've devoted really my entire professional career to, is looking for exomoons.

I think I wrote one paper at a particle physics lab, basically, at a small-angle neutron scattering experiment when I was an undergrad.