Scientists have developed a model to trace the so far elusive exomoons – natural satellites that revolve around exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the Sun) with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December 2021.
- This may also help detect 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 by using several ground-based and space telescopes such as Kepler, CoRoT, Spitzer, and Hubble space telescopes. However, the natural satellites or exomoon around any of these planets still remain untraced.
- The Solar system is constituted of a large number of natural satellites with various sizes and mass, and many of them influence the ambient environment of the Solar planets.
- Therefore, a large number of exomoons are expected to be present, and they may play a crucial role in the habitability of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone of their host stars.
- While most exoplanets are detected through photometric transit method, signals from exo-moons are too weak to detect mainly because of their extremely small size.
- Scientists at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore have demonstrated that the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is sufficiently powerful to detect the transit signal of exomoons in the photometric light curves of moon hosting exoplanets.
