NPR

Scientists Find What Could Be A History-Making Moon

Scientists have detected plenty of planets outside our solar system. Now, they say, they've found the first moon circling one of them.
(Top row, from left) Titan, Earth's moon, Europa and Enceladus. (Bottom row, from left) Callisto, Charon, Ariel and lo.

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 say in the journal 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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