An exomoon or extrasolar moon is a natural satellite that orbits an exoplanet or other non-stellar extrasolar body.
Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported as of January 2024 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.
HD 189733 b is an exoplanet in the constellation of Vulpecula approximately 64.5 light-years away from the Solar System. Astronomers in France discovered the planet orbiting the star HD 189733 on October 5, 2005, by observing its transit across the star's face. With a mass 11.2% higher than that of Jupiter and a radius 11.4% greater, HD 189733 b orbits its host star once every 2.2 days at an orbital speed of 152.0 kilometers per second, making it a hot Jupiter with poor prospects for extraterrestrial life.
WASP-12b is a hot Jupiter orbiting the star WASP-12, discovered in April of 2008, by the SuperWASP planetary transit survey. The planet takes only a little over one Earth day to orbit its star, in contrast to about 365.25 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun. Its distance from the star is only the Earth's distance from the Sun, with an eccentricity the same as Jupiter's. Consequently, it has one of the lowest densities for exoplanets. On December 3, 2013, scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) reported detecting water in the atmosphere of the exoplanet. In July 2014, NASA announced finding very dry atmospheres on three exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars.
HAT-P-11, also designated GSC 03561-02092 and Kepler-3, is a metal-rich orange dwarf star with a planetary system, 123 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. This star is notable for its relatively large rate of proper motion. The apparent magnitude of this star is about 9.6, which means it is not visible to the naked eye but can be seen with a medium-sized amateur telescope on a clear dark night. The age of this star is about 6.5 billion years.
Kepler-20 is a star about 934 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra with a system of at least five, and possibly six, known planets. The apparent magnitude of this star is 12.51, so it cannot be seen with the unaided eye. Viewing it requires a telescope with an aperture of 15 cm (6 in) or more. It is slightly smaller than the Sun, with 94% of the Sun's radius and about 91% of the Sun's mass. The effective temperature of the photosphere is slightly cooler than that of the Sun at 5466 K, giving it the characteristic yellow hue of a stellar class G8 star. The abundance of elements other than hydrogen or helium, what astronomers term the metallicity, is approximately the same as in the Sun. It may be older than the Sun, although the margin of error here is relatively large.
A subsatellite, also known as a submoon or informally a moonmoon, is a "moon of a moon" or a hypothetical natural satellite that orbits the moon of a planet.
Kepler-47c is an exoplanet orbiting the binary star system Kepler-47, the outermost of three such planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. The system, also involving two other exoplanets, is located about 3,400 light-years away.
The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) is a project whose aim is to search for exomoons, natural satellites of exoplanets, using data collected by the Kepler space telescope. Founded by British exomoonologist David Kipping and affiliated with the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, HEK submitted its first paper on June 30, 2011. HEK has since submitted five more papers, finding some evidence for an exomoon around a planet orbiting Kepler-1625b in July 2017.
Kepler-90h is an exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of the early G-type main sequence star Kepler-90, the outermost of eight such planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. It is located about 2,840 light-years, from Earth in the constellation Draco. The exoplanet was found by using the transit method, in which the dimming effect that a planet causes as it crosses in front of its star is measured.
Kepler-90g is a super-puff exoplanet orbiting the early G-type main sequence star Kepler-90, one of eight planets around this star discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope. It is located about 2,840 light-years (870 pc) from Earth, in the constellation Draco. The exoplanet was found by using the transit method, in which the dimming effect that a planet causes as it crosses in front of its star is measured. It orbits its parent star about every 210.5 days at a distance of 0.71 astronomical units.
Kepler-25c is an exoplanet orbiting the star Kepler-25, located in the constellation Lyra. The planet was first detected as a candidate extrasolar planet by the Kepler space telescope in 2011. It was confirmed, in 2012, by Jason Steffen and collaborators using transit-timing variations obtained by the Kepler Space Telescope. It orbits its parent star at only 0.110 astronomical units away, and at its distance it completes an orbit once every 12.7 days.
Kepler-1625 is a 14th-magnitude solar-mass star located in the constellation of Cygnus approximately 7,200 light-years away. Its mass is within 5% of that of the Sun, but its radius is approximately 70% larger reflecting its more evolved state. A candidate gas giant exoplanet was detected by the Kepler Mission around the star in 2015, which was later validated as a real planet to >99% confidence in 2016. In 2018, the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project reported evidence for a Neptune-sized exomoon around this planet, based on observations from NASA’s Kepler mission and the Hubble Space Telescope. Subsequently, the evidence for and reality of this exomoon candidate has been subject to debate.
Kepler-1625b is a super-Jupiter exoplanet orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-1625 about 2,500 parsecs away in the constellation of Cygnus. The large gas giant is approximately the same radius as Jupiter, and orbits its star every 287.4 days. In 2017, hints of a Neptune-sized exomoon in orbit of the planet was found using photometric observations collected by the Kepler Mission. Further evidence for a Neptunian moon was found the following year using the Hubble Space Telescope, where two independent lines of evidence constrained the mass and radius to be Neptune-like. The mass-signature has been independently recovered by two other teams. However, the radius-signature was independently recovered by one of the teams but not the other. The original discovery team later showed that this latter study appears affected by systematic error sources that may influence their findings.
GJ 9827 is a star in the constellation of Pisces. It is a K-type main-sequence star with an apparent magnitude of 10.250. It is 97 light-years away, based on parallax.
K2-24 is a metal-rich G3-type main sequence star larger and more massive than the Sun, located 560 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. Two confirmed transiting exoplanets are known to orbit this star. An attempt to detect stellar companions using adaptive optics imaging at the Keck telescope was negative however later observations using lucky imaging at the Danish 1.54 m telescope at La Silla Observatory detected a possible companion at 3.8 arcseconds distance from K2-24. This candidate companion being over 8 magnitudes fainter than K2-24 and with a color temperature of 5400 Kelvin, is inconsistent with a bound main sequence companion.
Kepler-1708b is a Jupiter-sized exoplanet orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-1708, located in the constellation of Cygnus approximately 5,600 light years away from Earth. It was first detected in 2011 by NASA's Kepler mission using the transit method, but was not identified as a candidate planet until 2019. In 2021, a candidate Neptune-sized exomoon in orbit around Kepler-1708b was found by astronomer David Kipping and colleagues in an analysis using Kepler transit data. However, subsequent research has raised discrepancies about the possible existence of an exomoon, similar to that of Kepler-1625b.
K2-25 is a young red dwarf star located in the Hyades cluster. There is a single known Neptune-sized planet in a 3.5 day orbit.
