Scientists have developed a model to observe the hitherto elusive exomoons natural satellites that orbit exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the Sun) with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December 2021. To reveal habitable exo-moons in the future and understand new worlds beyond our own. So far, five thousand exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than the Sun — have been discovered using several ground-based and space-based telescopes such as Kepler, CoRoT, Spitzer, and the Hubble Space Telescope. However, natural satellites or exomoons around any of these planets still remain undiscovered.
The solar system consists of a large number of natural satellites of various sizes and masses, and many of them influence the surrounding environment of the solar planets. Therefore, the presence of a large number of exomoons is expected, which may play a crucial role in the habitability of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone of their host stars. While most exoplanets are detected using the photometric transit method, signals from exo-moons are too weak to be detected, mainly due to their extremely small size.
Scientists at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore, an autonomous institute of the Ministry of Science and Technology, have demonstrated that the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is powerful enough to detect the transiting signal of exomoons in the photometric light curves of exoplanet host moons. Professor Sujan Sengupta and his graduate student Suman Saha have developed an analytical model that 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 exoplanets by incorporating various possible moon orientations. – planet-star system.
The collinearity or misalignment of the orbits of the planet and the Moon (using two angular parameters) are used as parameters and can be used to model all possible orbital alignments for the star-planet-moon system. Using these generic models and the analysis of exoplanet photometric transit light curves obtained by JWST, a large number of exomoons can be detected in the near future. According to researchers, an exo-moon around a gas giant planet like Jupiter in the host star’s habitable zone, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist, may harbor life. With a favorable Moon-planet-star alignment, such an exomoon may also be detected by the JWST. The research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, published by the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
