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TEHRAN, Apr 27 - The exotic object's status is a topic of considerable debate.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Six months after its unveiling, uncertainty still swirls around the first serious exomoon candidate.
Last October, Columbia University astronomers Alex Teachey and David Kipping announced that they had spotted evidence of a Neptune-size satellite orbiting Kepler-1625b, a Jupiter-like world that lies about 8,000 light-years from Earth.
The duo emphasized that the find, which was made using data gathered by NASA's Kepler and Hubble space telescopes, was tentative. Indeed, Teachey and Kipping described the newly detected object, known as Kepler-1625b I, as a candidate rather than the first confirmed exomoon.
That caution was warranted, according to two new studies by independent research teams. One of these papers asserts that the detection was likely an artifact of data processing, and the other stresses that the available information and analyses do not support confirmation at this time.
Thanks to the new results, "we do have a pretty definitive answer — that it doesn't exist," said Laura Kreidberg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Harvard Society of Fellows, the lead author of one of the new papers.
Teachey and Kipping don't share this view, however. In the coming days, Teachey said, the pair plans to submit a paper that, among other things, analyzes the work done by Kreidberg and her colleagues.
"Suffice it to say, we think the picture is a bit more complicated than is being reported," Teachey told Space.com via email. "That is, newer studies are not right by virtue of being new, and I think reporting along the lines of 'the moon isn't there after all' would be a bridge too far given the evidence in hand."
Source:space
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