Discovery Alert: A Flood of New Planets, Plus Hint of an ‘Exomoon'

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By Pat Brennan, NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. 

Excerpt: Data from NASA’s now-retired Kepler Space Telescope reveals an eclectic assortment of new planets and planetary systems that promises to deepen understanding of how exoplanets form. Some of the newly-discovered planets might make tempting targets for the James Webb Space Telescope, now being fine-tuned for its first observations this summer. The Webb telescope is expected to search for signs of atmospheres around some exoplanets, and potentially determine some of the gases and molecules present. This raft of new planets also helped push NASA’s tally of confirmed exoplanets past the 5,000 mark in March 2022. ...Combing through Kepler data also revealed another potentially significant find: a possible exomoon. ...The new possible exomoon, Kepler-1708 b-i, would be very large for a moon, about 2.6 times as big around as Earth. It would be orbiting a confirmed Jupiter-sized planet, itself in orbit around a Sun-like star more than 5,400 light-years away from Earth. It’s the second “unexpectedly large” exomoon candidate identified by astronomers; the first, Kepler-1625 b-i, was revealed in 2018 – a possible Uranus-sized moon also orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet. …

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