Scientists from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Karnataka state have developed an analytical model to trace thus far elusive exo-moons ̶ natural satellites that revolve around exo-planets orbiting stars apart from the Sun.
According to the press release by India's Ministry of Science & Technology, IIA’s Prof. Sujan Sengupta and his graduate student Suman Saha from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) used the data received by the James Webb Space Telescope to develop the model.
Scientists develop a model to trace elusive exo-moons with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
© Photo : Twitter/ @pibchennai
While around 5,000 exo-planets have been found through the use of various telescopes like Kepler, CoRoT, Spitzer, and Hubble, exo-moons around them have largely stayed untraceable, since they are hard to detect due to their extraordinarily small size.
The new analytical model uses the radius and orbital properties of the host planet and its moon as parameters to model the photometric transit light curve of moon-hosting exo-planets.
“The co-alignment or non-coalignment of orbits of the planet and the moon are used as parameters (using two angular parameters), and they can be used to model all the possible orbital alignments for a star-planet-moon system. Using these generic models and the analysis of photometric transit light curves of exo-planets that is being obtained by JWST, a large number of exo-moons can be detected,” DST said in its research papers.