Scientists may have detected the first moon orbiting a planet in a far-off solar system, though they caution that they still want to confirm the finding with another round of telescope observations.
“The fact is, it’s so strange and it’s the first of its kind,” says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. “That demands a higher level of rigor and skepticism than you would normally apply to a run-of-the-mill detection.”
Still, he and colleague Alex Teachey say in the journal Science Advances that they have good evidence that a Neptune-size moon is orbiting a Jupiter-like planet, in a solar system about 8,000 light-years away.
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