so, we may have found our first moon orbiting another planet? http://advances.sciencemag.org/lens/advances/4/10/eaav1784
it isn't confirmed yet (much like between the first detection of an exoplanet {1988} and the first confirmed one {1992, or '95 if we're talking main sequence stars}, this'll take years), but the evidence so far is well in favor of the object in question being a moon instead of a planet and honestly I'm excited as hell for this?
sure it's literally the easiest possible object to find of its type (a neptune-sized gas giant orbiting a superjovian at a great distance), but the fact that we've found something like this at all is kind of amazing
also it's a fucking -small gas giant orbiting another, larger gas giant-. that may very well have formed in place. if that's confirmed that bodes super well for finding like, actual habitable moons around gas giants in the future
@Thaminga a gas giant orbiting a gas giant, I wonder if the smaller one also has moons and if so just how deep orbital mechanics will physically let you go. Moons orbiting moons orbiting moons.
@Felthry I could definitely see four steps down happening (massive, almost-brown-dwarf gas giant -> small gas giant -> Mars-sized rocky moon -> tiny asteroidlike moonlet), though that would take a pretty huge system to really work out and sheer luck to actually like, exist
maybe around like, a type A or B star
@Thaminga @Felthry Now I'm wishing I'd taken screenshots of some of the buck-wild systems I've seen in Elite Dangerous (which claims to do a rough modeling of system accretion).
Here's one I found on a list of nearby Interesting Systems: https://www.edsm.net/en/system/bodies/id/20145/name/32+Cassiopeiae
