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Space
Space
Science
Robert Lea

Astronomers may have discovered the 1st moon outside of our solar system — or is it something weirder?

An illustration of the weird star system of CD-35 2722, the foreground object in a brown dwarf, the background object a star, but is the middle body an exomoon?.

Since the discovery of the first world beyond the solar system in the 1990s, astronomers have become adept at spotting extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. But while NASA's exoplanet catalog has burgeoned to over 6,000 confirmed entries, moons around these worlds, known as exomoons, have proved elusive.

In fact, we have failed to make a single confirmed discovery of an exomoon despite being certain that just as the planets of the solar system have their own natural satellites, worlds in other star systems must have them too.

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