InicioExoplanetasNew ‘exomoon’ detection challenges cosmic labels
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New ‘exomoon’ detection challenges cosmic labels

An international team led by Kevin Hoy has published in Nature the first plausible detection of an exosatellite: a Jupiter-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf companion of the low-mass star CD-35 2722. The find, made with ESO's VLT and the CRIRES+ spectrograph using the radial velocity method, blurs the classical distinction between planets, moons and stellar companions and opens a new chapter for the future Extremely Large Telescope.

SKYCR Web Team
By SKYCR Web Team
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This illustration shows the system around the star CD-35 2722, with the newly found moon-like object at the centre. The star –– the point source to the left –– has about half the mass of our Sun, and it is orbited by a brown dwarf, the reddish-brown object seen here in the foreground (right). The brown dwarf has about 37 times the mass of Jupiter: too massive to be a planet, but not massive enough to have sustained nuclear fusion like stars. This brown dwarf is, in turn, orbited by a newly discovered object at least as massive as Jupiter, seen at the centre of this image. This new object, found with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), is difficult to label. It behaves like a moon in the sense that it orbits an object that orbits a star. But this ‘moon’ is massive enough to be a planet, and the object it orbits, a brown dwarf, is neither a planet nor a star.

An international team led by Kevin Hoy has published in Nature the first plausible detection of an exosatellite: a Jupiter-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf companion of the low-mass star CD-35 2722. The find, made with ESO's VLT and the CRIRES+ spectrograph using the radial velocity method, blurs the classical distinction between planets, moons and stellar companions and opens a new chapter for the future Extremely Large Telescope.

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