YEARS in the past, when David Kipping lived in London, he would stroll house by the town and search for on the moon. As an astronomer, its faintly glowing presence served as a nightly supply of inspiration. “It was a reminder that moons had been ready for us round exoplanets,” he says. “It simply made sense that we must always search for them.”

Discovering exomoons – pure satellites of worlds past our photo voltaic system – can be thrilling. For a begin, they could play a key position in figuring out the habitability of host planets by damping their wobbles, fostering a secure local weather in the identical method that our moon has completed for Earth. They may additionally are available in bizarre configurations, reminiscent of rings of moons and moons with their very own moons. However most excitingly, it’s doable that a few of them are extra hospitable to life than exoplanets.

Kipping, now at Columbia College in New York, is a part of a small neighborhood of astronomers who seek for exomoons. The statistics, no less than, are on their aspect: now we have discovered some 5500 exoplanets up to now, and a few of these may have dozens of moons. The difficulty is, proving their existence isn’t simple. The 2 sightings Kipping has made up to now are hotly disputed.

However now, hope is on the horizon, with a bunch of latest methods to seek for these objects – from watching rogue planets which have deserted their stars to monitoring the gravitational wobbles of exoplanets. Armed with these new methods, and with new telescopes on the way in which, the moon…