Candidate for a Giant Exomoon Found in the CD-35 2722 System

Astronomers have found evidence of a massive body orbiting a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 system. It was detected using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the CRIRES+ instrument. For now, it is an exomoon candidate, not a confirmed discovery.

The body has a mass of at least that of Jupiter, while the brown dwarf is more than 30 times as massive as Jupiter. The dwarf itself orbits the star CD-35 2722, whose mass is about half that of the Sun.

The researchers studied small changes in the brown dwarf’s motion, which may point to the gravitational influence of a moon. If the findings are confirmed, this would be the first detected natural satellite beyond the Solar System. The object’s scale and its orbit around a brown dwarf make conventional classification difficult: the boundary between “planet” and “moon” is not clear here.

Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser CC BY 4.0 · License

Translation editor: Ловушкин А.