The Hunt for Exomoons – Lightcurve Demo

In addition to the host of new planets discovered by the Kepler mission, we are now capable of detecting large moons circling planets around other stars. These exomoons modify the shape, timing, and duration of the transit lightcurve of their host planet, and this illustration demonstrates all of these effects.

New algorithms are being developed to detect these signatures in Kepler data, and if large moons are common in the universe, the first exomoon discovery could happen at any time.

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