Astrophysicists have identified what may be the first moon ever detected outside the solar system, an object roughly the size of Jupiter orbiting a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 star system, the European Southern Observatory said on Wednesday.
The findings were published in the journal Nature and announced by ESO. Lead author Kevin Hoy, a researcher affiliated with ESO and Diego Portales University in Chile, and his team used the CRIRES+ instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile to measure wobbles in the brown dwarf, which is more than 30 times the mass of Jupiter. The candidate exomoon itself carries at least Jupiter's mass.
While more than 6,000 exoplanets have been confirmed to date, no exomoon had previously been verified. The object's unusual configuration — circling a brown dwarf rather than a planet — makes it a singular find in the search for celestial bodies beyond our solar system.