The Kepler mission found loads of exoplanets, and now astronomers are digging deeper into the data in the search for exo*moons* around those planets. All of which sends Chris and Emily on a deep dive into the detail of definitions: what's a moon, anyway? Do we know what a planet is? Or a star? Do astronomers actually understand anything at all?!
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Syzygy is produced by Dr Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.
Visit us at syzygy.fm or find us on Twitter: @syzygypod
Things we talk about in this episode:
Kepler mission: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/
Kepler’s been put to sleep: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler-put-into-sleep-mode-as-telescope-s-pointing-performance-degrades
Hubble’s gyro problems: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/hubble-space-telescope-taken-offline-after-gyroscope-failure/
Exomoon paper: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaav1784
Moons of the Solar System: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/in-depth/
Saturn’s moonlets: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/31/saturns-rings-contain-millions-moonlets-new-nasa-images-reveal-cassini
Jupiter’s rings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter
Multiple star systems: https://www.universetoday.com/132154/multiple-star-systems/
Pluto & Charon: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-and-charon-new-horizons-dynamic-duo
Animation of the Pluto-Charon binary: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Animations/Pluto-System.php