Astronomers May Have Found the First Exomoon Orbiting a Brown Dwarf
Using the Very Large Telescope, our team detected a Jupiter-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 system. This discovery challenges traditional definitions of moons and planets, as the object circles a substellar companion rather than a planet. While we call it an exosatellite, its unique formation blurs the lines of our Solar System-based labels, marking a potential breakthrough in understanding diverse planetary systems.
This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like 'planet' and 'moon'.
- delta_p_delta_x
Worth noting that the artist's impression is... not accurate. Both CD-35 2722 b (the brown dwarf orbiting the primary star) and CD-35 2722 b I (the exomoon orbiting the secondary) should be much closer in size. It is estimated that Jupiter is essentially the largest any gas giant can get; adding more mass will simply increase density and interior temperature until deuterium and lithium fusion and brown dwarfdom, and then at around 80 Jupiter masses, protium fusion and stardom.
Look at Barnard's Star[1], which is actually a fusing red dwarf star: it is not much bigger than Jupiter.
- hdz
A small dense planet, which orbits a star, is orbited by a larger gaseous moon. It's interesting the discovery is in Chile which has some of the best night skies, a Class 1 on the Bortle scale specifically in the Atacama Desert. Hoping to make it out there one day.
- Foskya
I guess it is more of a derivative of the question: "in which bucket should we put the brown dwarf? Is it a star or a planet?".
The answer is neither of course; but since it is more closely related to stars than to planets, I'm more inclined to call this satellite an exoplanet (instead of exomoon).
That being said it is still a nice finding, way more difficult to discover than "normal" exopanets.
- pelagicAustral
I know this is besides the article and all, but why would the Chilean flag be the only one to have 8px left margin? This is killing me...
<div style="margin-left: 8px" title="Chile" class="sprites-flag_cl"></div>
- HelloUsername
An important phrase from the article to consider before commenting: "This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon’"