Moonmoons
You read the title right. Recently, some astronomers thought they had spotted an “exomoon,” a moon orbiting an exoplanet. There are, of course, bound to be some. But now Gizmodo introduces us to the concept of the moonmoon, a submoon orbiting a moon. One research team is taking on the possibility: The team’s short analysis found that small submoons, perhaps 10 kilometers in radius, could only survive around large moons (such as the ones we see in our Solar System) far away from the host planet, according to the paper published on the arXiv preprint server. Moons that are too close to their host planets or too small might lose their submoons to tidal forces from the planet—shredding the submoon Read More ›