YEARS in the past, when David Kipping lived in London, he would stroll dwelling by way of town and lookup on the moon. As an astronomer, its faintly glowing presence served as a nightly supply of inspiration. “It was a reminder that moons have been ready for us round exoplanets,” he says. “It simply made sense that we should always search for them.”

Discovering exomoons – pure satellites of worlds past our photo voltaic system – can be thrilling. For a begin, they could play a key position in figuring out the habitability of host planets by damping their wobbles, fostering a secure local weather in the identical manner that our moon has carried out for Earth. They may additionally are available extraordinary configurations, equivalent to rings of moons and moons with their very own moons. However most excitingly, it’s doable that a few of them are extra hospitable to life than exoplanets.

Kipping, now at Columbia College in New York, is a part of a small group of astronomers who seek for exomoons. The statistics, at the least, are on their aspect: we’ve discovered some 5500 exoplanets thus far, and a few of these may have dozens of moons. The difficulty is, proving their existence isn’t easy. The 2 sightings Kipping has made thus far are hotly disputed.

However now, hope is on the horizon, with a bunch of recent methods to seek for these objects – from watching rogue planets which have deserted their stars to monitoring the gravitational wobbles of exoplanets. Armed with these new methods, and with new telescopes on the way in which, the moon…