# The Search for Alien Moons Just Got Much More Promising

An episode of [Bedtime Astronomy](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1736397134), 20 Sep 2026, 34 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/75121285/exomoonp.mp3

Could the James Webb Space Telescope finally detect small moons orbiting distant planets? New research shows that combining observations from multiple planetary transits can reduce noise and reveal much weaker signals. Although no exomoon was found around LP 890-9 c, the study suggests that the search for the first confirmed exomoon may be more promising than previously thought. Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs. This episode includes AI-generated content.

## Transcript

[0:03] Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
[0:07] Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
[0:12] Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
[0:16] Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
[0:20] Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
[0:22] Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
[0:27] Speaker 2: I want you to step outside tonight, assuming, you know,
[0:29] Speaker 2: the cloud cover actually cooperates wherever you are, and just
[0:31] Speaker 2: look up.
[0:32] Speaker 3: Yeah. Always a gamble with the clouds.
[0:34] Speaker 2: Right. Exactly.
[0:35] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[0:35] Speaker 2: But if it's clear what dominates your field of vision,
[0:39] Speaker 2: it is our moon.
[0:40] Speaker 3: Absolutely.
[0:41] Speaker 2: It's this massive crater glowing fear that has basically anchored
[0:46] Speaker 2: human navigation for millennia. I mean, it dictated our mythology.
[0:50] Speaker 2: And it literally pulls billions of tons of ocean water
[0:55] Speaker 2: back and forth across the globe every single day.
[0:58] Speaker 3: It's a huge physical presence.
[1:00] Speaker 2: It really is. Yeah. It is the defining companion to Earth.
[1:03] Speaker 2: So I want you to hold that image in your mind,
[1:06] Speaker 2: but then pan out, like way, way out.
[1:08] Speaker 3: Past the local neighborhood.
[1:09] Speaker 2: Exactly. Past the Oort cloud, past our local stars, right
[1:13] Speaker 2: into the galactic expanse. Because we know for an absolute
[1:16] Speaker 2: certainty now that the universe is just teeming with exoplanets.
[1:19] Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Thousands of them.
[1:21] Speaker 2: Right. The Kepler mission, past all these ground-based observatories, they've
[1:25] Speaker 2: confirmed over 5,000 of them. And statistically, I mean, there
[1:28] Speaker 2: have to be hundreds of billions more just in the
[1:31] Speaker 2: Milky Way alone. Easily.
[1:32] Speaker 3: It's a crowded galaxy.
[1:34] Speaker 2: But here is the massive, glaring, honestly kind of eerie
[1:38] Speaker 2: anomaly in all of that data. Where are all the exomoons?
[1:42] Speaker 3: That is, it's arguably one of the most profound silences
[1:45] Speaker 3: in modern astrophysics right now.
[1:47] Speaker 2: Right.
[1:47] Speaker 3: Because we are looking at a universe incredibly rich with
[1:51] Speaker 3: planetary bodies. You've got everything, hot Jupiters, super Earths, mini Neptunes,
[1:55] Speaker 3: spanning every conceivable mass and radius.
[1:58] Speaker 2: Every weird configuration you can think of.
[2:00] Speaker 3: Exactly. Yet the moons, the companions to those distant worlds,
[2:04] Speaker 3: they are entirely missing from our confirmed catalog.
[2:07] Speaker 2: Which is wild. Because based on our own solar system,
[2:11] Speaker 2: where moons outnumber planets by, what, 20 to 1?
[2:14] Speaker 3: Yeah, roughly 20 to 1. They could be everywhere.
[2:16] Speaker 2: I mean, we've got Jupiter sitting right here with nearly
[2:18] Speaker 2: 100 moons all by itself.
[2:19] Speaker 3: And Saturn has over 140. Right.
[2:22] Speaker 2: Even Mars, as small and barren as it is, managed
[2:25] Speaker 2: to capture a couple of random asteroids. So the math
[2:29] Speaker 2: heavily suggests that exomoons should be standard equipment for most
[2:33] Speaker 2: planets out there.
[2:34] Speaker 3: This should be the rule, not the exception.
[2:37] Speaker 2: And to tackle this absence, we unleashed the James Webb
[2:41] Speaker 2: Space Telescope. I mean, we are talking about an instrument
[2:44] Speaker 2: that can literally peer through cosmic dust to watch primordial
[2:49] Speaker 2: galaxies assemble.
[2:50] Speaker 3: It's analyzing the atmospheric chemistry of planets dozens of light
[2:53] Speaker 3: years away.
[2:54] Speaker 2: Exactly. So it was widely expected that JWST would just
[2:58] Speaker 2: blow the lid completely off the exomoon hunt. But we
[3:01] Speaker 2: have found exactly zero. Absolute silence.
[3:05] Speaker 3: And you know that silence isn't actually a story of absence.
[3:08] Speaker 3: It is fundamentally a story of noise.
[3:10] Speaker 2: Okay. I like that distinction.
[3:12] Speaker 3: Yeah, because to understand what is actually happening at the
[3:15] Speaker 3: frontier of this search right now, we really need to
[3:17] Speaker 3: look at a highly significant breakthrough from astronomer David Kipping.
[3:21] Speaker 2: Right, at Columbia University. Exactly.
[3:22] Speaker 3: Exactly. His team's latest work, it completely shifts the paradigm
[3:26] Speaker 3: of why we haven't found these companions yet, and more importantly,
[3:29] Speaker 3: how we actually can.
[3:30] Speaker 2: So that's our mission for this deep dive today. We
[3:33] Speaker 2: are unpacking this research to see why JWST's failure to
[3:37] Speaker 2: find an exomoon so far, well, it has absolutely nothing
[3:40] Speaker 2: to do with the optical limits of the telescope itself.
[3:43] Speaker 3: It's not a hardware problem at all.
[3:44] Speaker 2: Right. It's entirely a hurdle of data processing and observation strategy.
[3:50] Speaker 2: We're going to examine how a completely fascinating experiment undeniably
[3:54] Speaker 2: null result, meaning finding absolutely nothing around one specific hellish planet,
[4:00] Speaker 2: just proved that discovering an exomoon is entirely possible right now.
[4:05] Speaker 3: The capability is literally sitting up there at Lagrange point
[4:08] Speaker 3: two as we speak.
[4:09] Speaker 2: It is. So to appreciate the magnitude of this recent paper,
[4:14] Speaker 2: we really have to look at the history of the
[4:15] Speaker 2: drought first.
[4:16] Speaker 3: Yeah, the old way of doing things. Right.
[4:18] Speaker 2: Because the primary method for finding exoplanets and, you know,
[4:21] Speaker 2: the logical extension for finding exomoons, is transit photometry.
[4:26] Speaker 3: Which is basically waiting for a planet to cross the
[4:28] Speaker 3: face of its host star, and then we measure the
[4:30] Speaker 3: fractional dip in the starlight.
[4:32] Speaker 2: We measure the shadow, essentially. And we're talking about incredibly
[4:35] Speaker 2: tiny shadows here.
[4:36] Speaker 3: Minuscule.
[4:37] Speaker 2: Like, if a Jupiter-sized planet blocks a sun-like star, it
[4:41] Speaker 2: drops the light by maybe 1%.
[4:42] Speaker 3: And an Earth-sized planet is just one hundredth of a percent.
[4:45] Speaker 2: And an exomoon would be, what, an order of magnitude
[4:48] Speaker 2: smaller than that?
[4:49] Speaker 3: Exactly. They are tiny, tiny signals. And historically, astronomers relied
[4:55] Speaker 3: on observing just a single transit event.
[4:57] Speaker 2: Just one look. Right.
[4:59] Speaker 3: The operating logic for the last decade was basically, if
[5:02] Speaker 3: we simply build a telescope sensitive enough, like JWST with
[5:07] Speaker 3: its massive 6.5 meter beryllium mirror, a single clean look
[5:13] Speaker 3: would be enough.
[5:13] Speaker 2: You'd catch the planet's dip and then a tiny secondary
[5:16] Speaker 2: dip from the moon. Exactly.
[5:18] Speaker 3: Either leading or trailing the planet.
[5:20] Speaker 2: And I mean, it sounds totally logical on paper, right?
[5:22] Speaker 2: If your camera has a high enough resolution, you should
[5:24] Speaker 2: catch the planet and its moon in one single shot.
[5:27] Speaker 3: And the astronomical community put a lot of chips on
[5:29] Speaker 3: that specific bet.
[5:30] Speaker 2: They really did. And there is a prime example of
[5:33] Speaker 2: this that we need to talk about. Kepler-167e.
[5:36] Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the heartbreaker.
[5:37] Speaker 2: Totally. So this is a Jupiter analog. It's a massive
[5:40] Speaker 2: gas giant with a wide orbit going around a star
[5:42] Speaker 2: about a thousand light years away from us.
[5:44] Speaker 3: A prime candidate for a moon system.
[5:45] Speaker 1: Right.
[5:46] Speaker 2: So JWST dedicated precious observation time to watching a single
[5:50] Speaker 2: transit of Kepler-167e. The entire motivation for that observation was
[5:55] Speaker 2: the exomoon hunt.
[5:56] Speaker 3: They pointed the most advanced piece of machinery in human
[5:59] Speaker 3: history right at it.
[6:01] Speaker 2: And the result was entirely unusable.
[6:04] Speaker 3: Unusable is really the perfect word for it.
[6:06] Speaker 2: But not because it wasn't there.
[6:07] Speaker 3: Right, exactly. The attempt was foiled not because they could
[6:11] Speaker 3: definitively prove a moon wasn't there, but because the transit
[6:15] Speaker 3: light curve itself was just fundamentally compromised by red noise.
[6:19] Speaker 2: Okay, let's stop and talk about red noise, because this
[6:21] Speaker 2: seems to be the invisible brick wall that everyone keeps
[6:24] Speaker 2: hitting in these studies.
[6:25] Speaker 3: It is the absolute bane of high-precision photometry.
[6:30] Speaker 2: And I think it's important to clarify for you listening
[6:32] Speaker 2: that this isn't static. Like when I first encountered the term,
[6:35] Speaker 2: I immediately thought of white noise.
[6:37] Speaker 3: Like the random hiss on an old television?
[6:40] Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Which in astrophysics, I guess, is usually photon
[6:43] Speaker 2: shot noise, right? Just the random arrival times of light particles. Right.
[6:47] Speaker 3: But white noise is actually relatively easy for your software
[6:50] Speaker 3: to just smooth out. Red noise is an entirely different beast.
[6:54] Speaker 2: Because it's correlated, right?
[6:55] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[6:55] Speaker 3: Yes, red noise, or what we sometimes call 1F noise,
[6:59] Speaker 3: is correlated over time. It is a slow, low frequency
[7:02] Speaker 3: wandering in the data stream.
[7:04] Speaker 2: It's not just a random scatter of data points.
[7:06] Speaker 3: No, the baseline itself is heaving up and down on
[7:10] Speaker 3: a timescale that is terrifyingly very similar to the actual
[7:14] Speaker 3: duration of a planetary transit.
[7:15] Speaker 2: So it basically mimics the exact thing we were trying
[7:18] Speaker 2: to find. Exact. I was trying to visualize how this
[7:20] Speaker 2: actually ruins a measurement, and I came up with this analogy.
[7:24] Speaker 2: Imagine you are a doctor trying to listen to the
[7:26] Speaker 2: incredibly faint, rapid heartbeat of a tiny fetus using a stethoscope.
[7:31] Speaker 3: Okay, I follow.
[7:32] Speaker 2: But to hear it, you have to place the stethoscope
[7:35] Speaker 2: on the mother's chest while she is taking these deep,
[7:38] Speaker 2: slow breaths. Ah. That heavy breathing, that is your red noise.
[7:43] Speaker 2: It's a massive, slow, correlated wave of sound.
[7:46] Speaker 3: That's actually a really good way to picture it.
[7:48] Speaker 2: The tiny heartbeat is in there. The instrument is definitely
[7:51] Speaker 2: picking it up. But the low frequency heave of the
[7:53] Speaker 2: breathing completely masks it. And you can't just filter it
[7:57] Speaker 2: out easily.
[7:58] Speaker 3: Because the frequencies and the physical movements are completely entangled.
[8:02] Speaker 3: The breathing has a structure and a phase, just like
[8:05] Speaker 3: red noise does.
[8:06] Speaker 1: Right.
[8:06] Speaker 2: And in the context of JWST, this research actually isolates
[8:11] Speaker 2: several specific physical causes for this low frequency heave.
[8:16] Speaker 3: Yeah, the paper is very specific about where this comes from.
[8:20] Speaker 3: One of the primary culprits is thermal fluctuation within the
[8:23] Speaker 3: telescope's detectors themselves.
[8:24] Speaker 2: Okay, wait, hold on a second. I have to push
[8:26] Speaker 2: back here. Go for it. We spent, what, $ 10 billion
[8:30] Speaker 2: in nearly three decades engineering JWST.
[8:33] Speaker 3: Yep.
[8:34] Speaker 2: It sits behind a five-layer Captain Sunshield the size of
[8:37] Speaker 2: a tennis court just to keep it operating at near
[8:40] Speaker 2: absolute zero. How on earth is a flagship mission of
[8:43] Speaker 2: this magnitude getting derailed by its own detector warming up?
[8:46] Speaker 3: I know, it sounds ridiculous.
[8:48] Speaker 2: I mean, shouldn't thermal stability be the one thing we
[8:50] Speaker 2: absolutely nail?
[8:51] Speaker 3: It is a totally valid frustration, but you really have
[8:54] Speaker 3: to scale your expectations to the precision we are demanding
[8:57] Speaker 3: from this machine.
[8:58] Speaker 2: Okay, how precise are we talking?
[9:00] Speaker 3: We aren't talking about the telescope heating up by a
[9:02] Speaker 3: few degrees. We are talking about microkelvin variation.
[9:06] Speaker 2: Microkelvin?
[9:07] Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Yeah. JWST's near-infrared spectrograph and the near-infrared camera,
[9:13] Speaker 3: they are measuring stellar flux to the precision of a
[9:17] Speaker 3: few parts per million.
[9:18] Speaker 2: That is insane sensitivity. It is.
[9:21] Speaker 3: At that submicroscopic level of optical sensitivity, if, say, a
[9:26] Speaker 3: heater on the spacecraft cycles on, or if the angle
[9:29] Speaker 3: of the sunshield changes by a fraction of a degree
[9:32] Speaker 3: relative to the solar wind.
[9:33] Speaker 2: It's a tiny flutter.
[9:34] Speaker 3: Right. Right. The thermal expansion of the materials in the
[9:38] Speaker 3: optical path shifts by fractions of a nanometer.
[9:41] Speaker 2: Fractions of a nanometer. You can't even fathom that.
[9:43] Speaker 3: And that minuscule physical shift changes exactly how the photons
[9:47] Speaker 3: land on the pixel grid of the detector.
[9:49] Speaker 2: Oh, I see. So the pixels themselves report a false
[9:52] Speaker 2: change in brightness just because they physically shifted a nanometer
[9:55] Speaker 2: due to this microscopic temperature flutter.
[9:58] Speaker 3: Precisely. And that thermal drift happens slow. over hours, which
[10:01] Speaker 3: perfectly mimics the slow dip of an exomoon transit.
[10:03] Speaker 2: It's that heavy breathing again.
[10:05] Speaker 3: Exactly. And there's another major contributor to red noise, which
[10:08] Speaker 3: is spacecraft jitter or pointing drift.
[10:11] Speaker 2: Meaning the telescope physically shakes.
[10:13] Speaker 3: Sort of. JWST uses these fine guidance sensors to stay
[10:18] Speaker 3: locked onto a star. But even the reaction wheels spinning
[10:22] Speaker 3: inside to maintain attitude control, they impart a tiny vibration.
[10:25] Speaker 2: So it's vibrating while taking the picture.
[10:27] Speaker 3: The pointing drifts by just a fraction of a milliard second. Again,
[10:31] Speaker 3: the starlight moves slightly across the detector pixels. And because
[10:34] Speaker 3: pixels are never perfectly uniform in their sensitivity, the measured
[10:38] Speaker 3: brightness wanders.
[10:39] Speaker 2: It works at all, honestly. And, you know, it isn't
[10:43] Speaker 2: just our equipment betraying us. The universe itself is throwing
[10:47] Speaker 2: red noise at us. Specifically the stars we're actually trying
[10:50] Speaker 2: to look at.
[10:50] Speaker 3: Right. Stellar activity is a massive hurdle in all of this.
[10:53] Speaker 3: Stars are not uniform, quiet light bulbs.
[10:56] Speaker 2: They're violent, boiling balls of plasma.
[10:58] Speaker 3: Exactly. They have convective envelopes, immense magnetic fields, and of
[11:02] Speaker 3: course sunspots.
[11:03] Speaker 2: And sunspots are just these cooler, darker regions on the
[11:06] Speaker 2: stellar surface, right? Yes.
[11:08] Speaker 3: So imagine a planet transits across the star and happens
[11:11] Speaker 3: to pass over a sunspot.
[11:13] Speaker 2: The amount of light being blocked suddenly decreases because that
[11:16] Speaker 2: spot was already dark.
[11:17] Speaker 3: Exactly. It creates a weird bump in your transit curve.
[11:20] Speaker 2: But what if it doesn't cross the spot? What if
[11:23] Speaker 2: the spot is just elsewhere on the star?
[11:25] Speaker 3: Even then, if a large sunspot simply rotates into view
[11:28] Speaker 3: on the edge of the star during your observation, the
[11:31] Speaker 3: total overall brightness of the star drops.
[11:34] Speaker 2: Ah, because the star is spinning.
[11:36] Speaker 3: Right. And because stellar rotation and magnetic activity happen on
[11:39] Speaker 3: timescales of days and weeks, these changes manifest as a slow,
[11:44] Speaker 3: meandering baseline in the light curve.
[11:47] Speaker 2: So to your software that's desperately looking for a moon,
[11:50] Speaker 2: a sunspot rotating into view looks exactly like an exomoon
[11:53] Speaker 2: just beginning its transit.
[11:54] Speaker 3: It is identical to the algorithm.
[11:56] Speaker 2: It's honestly no wonder Kepler-167e was a total bust. I mean,
[12:00] Speaker 2: if the detector is drifting thermally and the reaction wheels
[12:02] Speaker 2: are vibrating and the star is spinning sunspots into view,
[12:06] Speaker 2: you are looking at a chaotic mess of overlapping signals.
[12:09] Speaker 3: Overlapping sine waves, essentially. A single transit simply doesn't give
[12:13] Speaker 3: you enough context to untangle what is an instrumental artifact,
[12:18] Speaker 3: what is a sunspot, and what is a real moon.
[12:21] Speaker 2: Which I imagine forces a pretty radical change in methodology.
[12:24] Speaker 3: It absolutely has to. If the single transit architecture is
[12:28] Speaker 3: fundamentally broken by red noise, the only path forward is
[12:33] Speaker 3: aggressive multi-transit observation.
[12:35] Speaker 2: We need to look at a planet repeatedly to build
[12:37] Speaker 2: some sort of statistical defense against all this chaos.
[12:40] Speaker 3: Exactly. And this requirement for massive data volume leads us
[12:44] Speaker 3: directly to the perfect test subject of Kippinger's study.
[12:48] Speaker 2: Right, an exoplanet with the catchy designation of LP899C.
[12:52] Speaker 3: Rolls right off the tongue.
[12:54] Speaker 2: But I want to spend some time on LP899C because
[12:56] Speaker 2: the physical reality of this world is staggering. And I
[12:58] Speaker 2: think it highlights just how strange the exoplanet catalog really
[13:02] Speaker 2: is compared to our neighborhood.
[13:03] Speaker 3: It's a very alien system.
[13:05] Speaker 2: So this planet is located about 105 light years away
[13:07] Speaker 2: from us. And it orbits an ultra-cool red dwarf.
[13:11] Speaker 3: Specifically, it's an M dwarf star. These are stars at
[13:14] Speaker 3: the extreme low mass end of the main sequence.
[13:17] Speaker 2: So they're tiny.
[13:17] Speaker 3: Very tiny. They are highly conductive, very dim, and they
[13:20] Speaker 3: emit most of their energy in the infrared.
[13:23] Speaker 2: Which actually makes them perfect targets for JWST, since it's
[13:27] Speaker 2: an infrared telescope.
[13:28] Speaker 3: Exactly. They are a match made in heaven.
[13:30] Speaker 2: But because the star is so small and dim, the
[13:32] Speaker 2: geometry of this whole system is incredibly tight. LP890-9C has
[13:38] Speaker 2: an orbital period-like, a full year on this planet. of
[13:41] Speaker 2: just 8.46 days.
[13:43] Speaker 3: It's whipping around.
[13:44] Speaker 2: It really is. It is sitting at a distance of 0.04
[13:47] Speaker 2: astronomical units from its star.
[13:49] Speaker 3: For some context there, Mercury orbits our sun at roughly 0.39 AU.
[13:54] Speaker 2: Wow. So LPAD 99C is orbiting at roughly one tenth
[13:58] Speaker 2: the distance of Mercury.
[13:59] Speaker 3: It is practically skimming the stellar corona.
[14:01] Speaker 2: And this is where we hit one of the great
[14:03] Speaker 2: paradoxes of modern astronomy, which I always find totally mind bending.
[14:07] Speaker 2: Despite hugging its star at a distance of just a
[14:09] Speaker 2: few million miles, LP 899 C is theoretically considered to
[14:13] Speaker 2: be firmly within the habitable zone.
[14:15] Speaker 3: The math checks out on that.
[14:16] Speaker 2: I mean, imagine that. You have a star so incredibly anemic,
[14:19] Speaker 2: so cool, that you have to huddle up against it
[14:22] Speaker 2: closer than Mercury just to reach the theoretical temperatures required
[14:26] Speaker 2: for liquid water.
[14:27] Speaker 3: It completely redefines our intuitive sense of what a solar
[14:30] Speaker 3: system looks like. And being that close has profound physical
[14:34] Speaker 3: implications for the planet itself.
[14:36] Speaker 2: I bet.
[14:36] Speaker 3: At 0.04 AU, a planet is almost certainly tidally locked.
[14:40] Speaker 2: Meaning one side always faces the star, like our moon
[14:44] Speaker 2: faces Earth.
[14:44] Speaker 3: Exactly. One hemisphere perpetually faces the star, baking in eternal daylight,
[14:50] Speaker 3: while the other side faces the deep, permanent freeze of space.
[14:54] Speaker 2: The weather on that planet must be horrifying.
[14:56] Speaker 3: Oh, the atmospheric dynamics required to just distribute heat and
[15:00] Speaker 3: prevent the entire atmosphere from freezing and collapsing on the
[15:02] Speaker 3: dark side. They are incredibly complex.
[15:05] Speaker 2: Okay, but wait. Let me ask you this. Sure. If
[15:08] Speaker 2: this planet is whipping around its star in 8.5 days,
[15:11] Speaker 2: it's tidally locked, facing intense magnetic flare activity from this
[15:15] Speaker 2: M dwarf.
[15:16] Speaker 3: Ah.
[15:17] Speaker 2: Is this really the best place to look for a moon?
[15:20] Speaker 3: Ah, I see where you're going.
[15:21] Speaker 2: The astrophysics just seem brutal. Why did Kipping's team point
[15:24] Speaker 2: JWST here? Instead of, you know, a nice, quiet, wide
[15:28] Speaker 2: orbit gas giant.
[15:30] Speaker 3: Because the rapid orbit was the entire point of the exercise.
[15:33] Speaker 3: They didn't select LP89099C because it was a hospitable, cozy
[15:38] Speaker 3: environment for a moon.
[15:39] Speaker 2: They didn't.
[15:40] Speaker 3: No, they selected it because it was an incredibly efficient
[15:42] Speaker 3: data generator. The enemy here is red noise. And the
[15:47] Speaker 3: weapon to defeat red noise is multi-transit phase folding. Right.
[15:51] Speaker 3: If you want to observe a Jupiter analog that takes, say,
[15:54] Speaker 3: five years to orbit its star, you have to wait
[15:56] Speaker 3: 50 years to capture 10 transits. JWST simply does not
[16:00] Speaker 3: have that kind of time.
[16:00] Speaker 2: Oh, I get it now. So because LP89090C orbits every 8.46 days,
[16:05] Speaker 2: you can just rack up transits constantly. Yes.
[16:08] Speaker 3: You can capture a dozen transits in a single standard
[16:10] Speaker 3: observing cycle.
[16:11] Speaker 2: It's a rapid fire target.
[16:12] Speaker 3: Exactly. It provided the high-frequency temporal data necessary to test
[16:16] Speaker 3: a completely different mathematical approach to processing the light.
[16:20] Speaker 2: And this brings us into the core of the preprint
[16:22] Speaker 2: paper Kipping published. They managed to secure observation time for
[16:27] Speaker 2: 12 distinct transits of this specific planet.
[16:31] Speaker 3: 12 passes across the star.
[16:32] Speaker 2: Right. And the strategy they deployed to process those 12
[16:35] Speaker 2: transits is fundamentally different from just looking for a single
[16:39] Speaker 2: obvious dip in a graph.
[16:40] Speaker 3: They used a technique of mathematical averaging, specifically focused on
[16:45] Speaker 3: marginalizing that correlated red noise we talked about.
[16:48] Speaker 2: Let's really break down how this mathematical averaging actually strips
[16:51] Speaker 2: the red noise away. Because if red noise is correlated,
[16:55] Speaker 2: if it's that heavy breathing from the stethoscope analogy, how
[16:58] Speaker 2: does stacking 12 transits suddenly make the breathing stop?
[17:01] Speaker 3: Well, it doesn't make the breathing stop exactly. It exploits
[17:04] Speaker 3: the fact that the breathing is asynchronous with the planet's orbit.
[17:08] Speaker 2: Asynchronous. OK, walk me through that.
[17:10] Speaker 3: We have to look at the rigid, unforgiving laws of
[17:12] Speaker 3: orbital mechanics here. An exomoon is a massive physical body
[17:16] Speaker 3: trapped in a gravity well.
[17:17] Speaker 2: It's a giant rock.
[17:19] Speaker 3: It cannot just materialize out of nowhere wherever an instrumental
[17:22] Speaker 3: glitch happens to occur in the telescope. It must obey
[17:25] Speaker 3: Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
[17:28] Speaker 2: It has to follow a physical path.
[17:29] Speaker 3: Right. Over multiple orbits, a moon will produce a persistent,
[17:33] Speaker 3: mathematically predictable signal.
[17:35] Speaker 2: Even if the moon is moving around the planet while
[17:37] Speaker 2: it orbits the star, right, it's transit signatures, like arriving
[17:42] Speaker 2: slightly early or slightly late or creating secondary dips, they're
[17:46] Speaker 2: totally bound by a predictable phase geometry. Yes.
[17:50] Speaker 3: The astrophysical signal of a moon is strictly correlated to
[17:53] Speaker 3: the orbital period, but the red noise is not.
[17:56] Speaker 2: Ah, I see.
[17:57] Speaker 3: The thermal drift of the interspect detector inside JWST does
[18:01] Speaker 3: not care at all about the 8.46-day orbit of LP899
[18:04] Speaker 3: is in C.
[18:05] Speaker 2: It just warms up whenever it warms up.
[18:07] Speaker 1: Exactly.
[18:07] Speaker 3: Exactly. The magnetic dynamo driving sunspots on that M-dwarf operates
[18:11] Speaker 3: on its own stellar rotation schedule, which is completely decoupled
[18:15] Speaker 3: from the planet's orbit.
[18:16] Speaker 2: So in transit number one, the detector might be drifting warmer,
[18:18] Speaker 2: creating this weird upward slope in your light curve.
[18:22] Speaker 3: But in transit number four, the detector might be perfectly
[18:24] Speaker 3: stable or maybe cooling down.
[18:27] Speaker 2: So the red noise is correlated locally within a single observation,
[18:31] Speaker 2: but it is completely uncorrelated across the different epochs.
[18:33] Speaker 3: Correct. When Kipping's team takes the photometric data from all
[18:37] Speaker 3: 12 transits and mathematically overlays them, a process that often
[18:41] Speaker 3: involves some heavy Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations to fit
[18:44] Speaker 3: the models, they are aligning the data by the exact
[18:47] Speaker 3: orbital phase of the planet.
[18:49] Speaker 2: So you basically anchor all 12 graphs on the exact
[18:52] Speaker 2: moment the planet crosses the dead center of the star.
[18:55] Speaker 3: When you do that, the persistent orbit-bound signals, so the
[18:59] Speaker 3: planet itself and any potential moon, they stack constructively.
[19:03] Speaker 2: The signal amplitude reinforces itself. Yes.
[19:06] Speaker 3: But the red noise anomalies, because they occur at totally
[19:08] Speaker 3: random phases relative to that planetary orbit, they begin to
[19:12] Speaker 3: destructively interfere with each other.
[19:14] Speaker 2: So the thermal peak from Transit 1 kind of fills
[19:16] Speaker 2: in the sunspot valley from Transit 7.
[19:19] Speaker 3: Exactly. As you average the 12-bit box together, the wandering
[19:22] Speaker 3: baseline is mathematically beaten down, and a pristine, totally flat
[19:26] Speaker 3: light curve emerges, revealing the true astrophysical flux underneath.
[19:30] Speaker 2: Okay, so back to the stethoscope for a second.
[19:32] Speaker 3: Let's hear it.
[19:33] Speaker 2: If you record the mother's heartbeat and the fetus's heartbeat
[19:35] Speaker 2: for 10 straight minutes, the mother's heavy breathing is really loud.
[19:39] Speaker 2: But if you take that 10-minute recording, chop it up into, say,
[19:42] Speaker 2: two-second clips aligned exactly with every single beat of the
[19:45] Speaker 2: fetus's heart, and then average all those audio clips together.
[19:48] Speaker 3: The breathing disappears. Right.
[19:50] Speaker 2: Because the mother's breathing, which happens at a totally different
[19:53] Speaker 2: disconnected rhythm, averages out into just a flat, low hum.
[19:59] Speaker 2: And the tiny fetal heartbeat, because it's perfectly aligned in
[20:02] Speaker 2: every single clip, suddenly spikes right through the noise.
[20:05] Speaker 3: That is actually a brilliant translation of phase folding. You
[20:09] Speaker 3: are using the periodicity of the target to isolate it
[20:13] Speaker 3: from a non-periodic environment.
[20:15] Speaker 2: It's just elegant math.
[20:16] Speaker 3: It really is. And the paper provides a stunning empirical
[20:19] Speaker 3: proof of this. Out of the 12 observed transits they
[20:22] Speaker 3: got for LP890-9C, the researchers noted that one specific transit
[20:27] Speaker 3: was just disastrous.
[20:28] Speaker 2: Really bad data.
[20:29] Speaker 3: Terrible. It suffered from highly noticeable severe red noise. It
[20:33] Speaker 3: was likely a massive instrumental drift, Or maybe a giant
[20:37] Speaker 3: stellar flare.
[20:38] Speaker 2: Now, in the old single transit paradigm, that observation is
[20:41] Speaker 2: just a total loss, right? You just throw it in
[20:43] Speaker 2: the trash.
[20:44] Speaker 3: Oh, it would have been completely discarded. But within this
[20:46] Speaker 3: new averaging framework, they demonstrated something amazing.
[20:50] Speaker 2: What's that?
[20:50] Speaker 3: When they mathematically combined that highly degraded, messy data with
[20:55] Speaker 3: just one other relatively clean transit, the overall sensitivity of
[20:59] Speaker 3: the combined data improved dramatically.
[21:02] Speaker 2: Wait, I would think combining bad data with good data...
[21:06] Speaker 2: just makes the good data worse. Yeah. It feels totally counterintuitive.
[21:09] Speaker 3: I know it does.
[21:10] Speaker 2: Like if you have a beautifully clean photo of a
[21:13] Speaker 2: landscape and a blurry photo of the exact same landscape,
[21:17] Speaker 2: overlaying them just makes the clean one look slightly blurry.
[21:20] Speaker 3: That intuition holds up for aesthetics, definitely, but not for
[21:23] Speaker 3: photon counting statistics.
[21:25] Speaker 2: Why not?
[21:25] Speaker 3: Because in astrophysics, every collected photon contains a non-zero amount
[21:30] Speaker 3: of truth about the system. The messy transit still contains
[21:33] Speaker 3: the true dip of the planet, and any potential moon.
[21:37] Speaker 3: It's just buried deeply under the noise.
[21:39] Speaker 2: So it's in there. It's just hard to see.
[21:41] Speaker 3: Right. By mathematically weighting the data based on its variance,
[21:45] Speaker 3: the clean transit provides a strong baseline, and the messy
[21:48] Speaker 3: transit still contributes its underlying astrophysical signal while its random
[21:52] Speaker 3: noise is diluted. You never throw away photons if you
[21:55] Speaker 3: have a mathematical architecture to model the noise.
[21:58] Speaker 2: That is fascinating. So they successfully processed these 12 transits
[22:02] Speaker 2: They beat down all the red noise. They flattened the baseline.
[22:05] Speaker 2: They achieved this incredibly pristine light curve of LP 890-9C.
[22:12] Speaker 2: And what did they find hiding in that beautiful data?
[22:14] Speaker 3: Absolutely nothing. Zero moons.
[22:16] Speaker 2: A complete null result.
[22:17] Speaker 3: And this is crucial. This is where we have to
[22:19] Speaker 3: distinguish between a failure and a true null result.
[22:21] Speaker 2: Okay, what's the difference?
[22:22] Speaker 3: A failure is Kepler-167e. Yeah. where the noise was so
[22:26] Speaker 3: bad you literally couldn't tell if a moon was there
[22:28] Speaker 3: or not. A null result is when your vision is
[22:30] Speaker 3: so impossibly sharp, so mathematically clear, that you can definitively
[22:34] Speaker 3: prove a moon does not exist.
[22:36] Speaker 2: Ah, I see.
[22:37] Speaker 3: The results of this study showed, with 95% statistical confidence,
[22:40] Speaker 3: that there are absolutely no moons larger than 0.1 Earth
[22:44] Speaker 3: radii orbiting LP 890.9c.
[22:46] Speaker 2: 0.1 Earth radii. That is an absurd level of precision.
[22:50] Speaker 3: It really is.
[22:51] Speaker 2: To give you some scale listening to this, The Earth
[22:54] Speaker 2: is about 6,300 kilometers in radius. So 0.1 Earth radii
[22:59] Speaker 2: is roughly 630 kilometers.
[23:00] Speaker 3: Right.
[23:01] Speaker 2: That definitively rules out anything the size of Jupiter's Galilean moons.
[23:05] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[23:06] Speaker 2: Io, Europa, Ganymede, they're all significantly larger than 630 kilometers.
[23:11] Speaker 3: Yes, they are.
[23:11] Speaker 2: Saturn's moon Enceladus, you know, the one famous for shooting
[23:14] Speaker 2: geysers of water into space, is smaller than that. But
[23:18] Speaker 2: this survey still rules out a huge, vast swath of
[23:21] Speaker 2: the major moons in our own solar system.
[23:23] Speaker 3: It is, by a massive margin, the most sensitive exomoon
[23:27] Speaker 3: hunt ever conducted, period. We are now officially capable of
[23:31] Speaker 3: probing down to the sub-Earth true moon mass regime.
[23:35] Speaker 2: But this brings up a massive physical question. If this
[23:38] Speaker 2: technique is so powerful, why did it turn up completely empty?
[23:41] Speaker 2: And earlier you mentioned that they didn't even expect to
[23:43] Speaker 2: find a moon here.
[23:44] Speaker 3: Right, they didn't.
[23:45] Speaker 2: Let's dig into the brutal physics of why a moon
[23:47] Speaker 2: couldn't survive around LP899C, because I think it highlights just
[23:51] Speaker 2: how hostile these compact systems really are. Yeah.
[23:54] Speaker 3: The absence of a moon here is entirely consistent with
[23:57] Speaker 3: the laws of orbital dynamics. We really have to look
[24:00] Speaker 3: at the gravitational environment at 0.04 AU.
[24:04] Speaker 2: It must be intense.
[24:05] Speaker 3: It's unimaginable. Gravity follows an inverse square law. It weakens
[24:09] Speaker 3: rapidly with distance. But when a planet is crammed that
[24:13] Speaker 3: incredibly close to a massive body like a star, the
[24:16] Speaker 3: gravitational gradient across the actual diameter of the planet is immense.
[24:21] Speaker 2: Meaning the front and back of the planet feel different gravity.
[24:24] Speaker 3: Exactly. The side of the planet facing the star experiences
[24:27] Speaker 3: a significantly stronger gravitational pull than the side facing away.
[24:32] Speaker 2: Which is exactly the mechanism that causes the tides on Earth.
[24:35] Speaker 2: The moon's gravity pulls harder on the side of Earth
[24:38] Speaker 2: facing it, which bulges the oceans outward.
[24:41] Speaker 3: Right. But here the moon doing the pulling is a
[24:43] Speaker 3: literal star and the distances are incredibly tight.
[24:46] Speaker 2: So the tidal forces are magnified to an apocalyptic scale.
[24:49] Speaker 3: They are. Now imagine a tiny moon attempting to maintain
[24:52] Speaker 3: an orbit around LP 89090 in that environment. That moon
[24:56] Speaker 3: is caught in a violent gravitational tug of war. The
[25:00] Speaker 3: planet is trying to hold on to it, but the
[25:02] Speaker 3: host star is exerting massive tidal shear. Constantly trying to
[25:06] Speaker 3: just rip the moon away.
[25:08] Speaker 2: It's being pulled in two directions constantly.
[25:10] Speaker 3: Furthermore, tidal dissipation within the planet itself causes orbital migration.
[25:15] Speaker 2: Wait, meaning the moon wouldn't just stay in a stable
[25:18] Speaker 2: circular orbit. Exactly.
[25:20] Speaker 3: Depending on the rotation rate of the planet relative to
[25:22] Speaker 3: the moon's orbit, tidal friction will either transfer angular momentum
[25:26] Speaker 3: to the moon, pushing it slowly outward, or bleed angular
[25:30] Speaker 3: momentum from the moon, dragging it inward.
[25:32] Speaker 2: And in a compact system like this. Right.
[25:34] Speaker 3: Where the planet is almost certainly tidally locked to the star,
[25:37] Speaker 3: the planetary rotation is very slow. Any close-in moon would
[25:41] Speaker 3: orbit faster than the planet rotates.
[25:43] Speaker 2: Oh, like Phobos orbiting Mars.
[25:44] Speaker 1: Yes.
[25:45] Speaker 3: Perfect example.
[25:46] Speaker 2: Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars spins, so tidal forces
[25:49] Speaker 2: are actually dragging Phobos down. It is doomed to crash
[25:53] Speaker 2: into the surface eventually.
[25:54] Speaker 3: That is the exact analog. The tidal friction would act
[25:58] Speaker 3: as a massive break. dragging the exomoon's orbit inward, closer
[26:02] Speaker 3: and closer to LP 890.9c over millions of years.
[26:07] Speaker 2: But you said earlier it wouldn't just crash into the surface.
[26:10] Speaker 3: Right, because long before it hit the atmosphere, it would
[26:12] Speaker 3: cross the Roche limit.
[26:14] Speaker 2: Ah, the Roche limit. Such a fascinating boundary in space.
[26:17] Speaker 3: It really is.
[26:18] Speaker 2: It is basically the invisible line in space where the
[26:21] Speaker 2: gravitational forces of the planet pulling on the near side
[26:24] Speaker 2: of the moon become stronger than the self-gravity actually holding
[26:27] Speaker 2: the moon together. Yes.
[26:29] Speaker 3: Once a moon crosses the Roche limit, its structural integrity
[26:32] Speaker 3: fails completely. The rock and ice can literally no longer
[26:36] Speaker 3: hold themselves in a sphere.
[26:37] Speaker 2: The gravity overpowers the glue holding the rock together.
[26:40] Speaker 3: The moon is subjected to catastrophic tidal disruption. It is
[26:44] Speaker 3: literally shredded into billions of pieces, smeared out along its
[26:48] Speaker 3: orbital path.
[26:49] Speaker 2: So any moon that might have formed around LP899C or
[26:52] Speaker 2: maybe been captured by it early on It wouldn't just disappear.
[26:55] Speaker 2: It would be pulverized into a massive system of rings.
[26:59] Speaker 3: Which is just an incredible astrophysical reality to consider. The
[27:03] Speaker 3: null result here wasn't just a lack of data. It
[27:06] Speaker 3: was a physical confirmation of the violent orbital mechanics of
[27:09] Speaker 3: compact M dwarf systems. Any primordial moons were likely destroyed
[27:14] Speaker 3: billions of years ago.
[27:16] Speaker 2: Which brings me back to the strategy of telescope time,
[27:18] Speaker 2: because this is the real paradox here.
[27:20] Speaker 3: Right.
[27:21] Speaker 2: We established that time on JWST is arguably the most
[27:25] Speaker 2: fiercely contested real estate in modern science. Thousands of astrophysicists
[27:31] Speaker 2: submit proposals to the Time Allocation Committee every single cycle,
[27:35] Speaker 2: practically begging for just a few hours.
[27:37] Speaker 3: It's incredibly competitive.
[27:39] Speaker 2: So if David Kipping and his team knew the astrophysics
[27:42] Speaker 2: dictated that a moon couldn't survive here, if they knew
[27:45] Speaker 2: it was gravitationally impossible to find one, How did they
[27:48] Speaker 2: convince the committee to give them enough time to watch
[27:50] Speaker 2: 12 whole transits? Isn't that just a waste of time?
[27:52] Speaker 3: It sounds like it, but no. Because the proposal wasn't
[27:55] Speaker 3: actually about finding a moon on LP 890.9c.
[27:58] Speaker 2: It wasn't.
[27:59] Speaker 3: Not at all. It was about proving a methodology that
[28:01] Speaker 3: could unlock the rest of the universe.
[28:03] Speaker 2: Okay, explain that.
[28:04] Speaker 3: The astronomical community was operating under a very dangerous assumption.
[28:08] Speaker 3: For the past several years, basically since JWST launched, a
[28:12] Speaker 3: consensus had begun to form that the telescope possessed an
[28:16] Speaker 3: inherent noise floor.
[28:17] Speaker 2: A noise floor.
[28:18] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[28:19] Speaker 2: Like a hard physical limit to the instrument's capability.
[28:22] Speaker 3: Exactly. The belief was that because of the thermal drift
[28:26] Speaker 3: and the pointing jitter we discussed earlier, the data would
[28:29] Speaker 3: always bottom out at a certain level of blurriness.
[28:31] Speaker 1: Right.
[28:31] Speaker 2: People thought that red noise created a permanent wall and
[28:34] Speaker 2: that JWST simply could not detect true Earth mass or
[28:39] Speaker 2: sub-Earth mass exomoons no matter how hard we looked. Yes.
[28:43] Speaker 3: It was a deeply pessimistic view of our flagship observatory.
[28:46] Speaker 3: Kipping out a study was designed specifically to shatter that assumption.
[28:50] Speaker 2: Ah. So they targeted LP899C precisely because it allowed them
[28:56] Speaker 2: to gather 12 transits quickly, not because they expected to
[28:59] Speaker 2: find a moon.
[29:00] Speaker 3: Exactly. It was a stress test of the algorithm.
[29:02] Speaker 2: Basically an epistemological shift. They didn't just test the planet.
[29:05] Speaker 2: They tested human knowledge.
[29:07] Speaker 3: Very well put.
[29:08] Speaker 2: They proved that the noise floor isn't a physical limit
[29:11] Speaker 2: of the telescope's hardware at all. It is just a
[29:13] Speaker 2: symptom of our own data processing.
[29:15] Speaker 3: The hardware is basically flawless for this application. JWST absolutely
[29:20] Speaker 3: has the optical sensitivity to see a moon the size
[29:24] Speaker 3: of Europa orbiting a planet dozens of light years away.
[29:27] Speaker 2: Which means we aren't waiting for some future telescope in
[29:29] Speaker 2: 2050 to do this.
[29:30] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[29:31] Speaker 2: The tool is already built and flying.
[29:33] Speaker 3: That is the profound triumph of this paper. The technological
[29:37] Speaker 3: barrier has been completely removed. But... in removing the technological barrier,
[29:42] Speaker 3: Kipping has exposed the true bottleneck.
[29:44] Speaker 2: Which is logistical.
[29:45] Speaker 3: Right, it's time allocation.
[29:47] Speaker 2: We now know definitively that to find an exomoon, we
[29:50] Speaker 2: simply cannot rely on single transits. We need 10, 12,
[29:54] Speaker 2: maybe 15 transits to beat down the red noise.
[29:57] Speaker 3: But think about the astronomical cost of that.
[29:59] Speaker 2: Right, because if you want to find an exomoon around
[30:01] Speaker 2: a planet in a more temperate Earth-like orbit.
[30:04] Speaker 3: Say a planet that takes a full Earth year to
[30:07] Speaker 3: orbit a Sun-like star.
[30:09] Speaker 2: Gathering 12 transits would literally require 12 years of observation.
[30:13] Speaker 3: Exactly. You would have to point JWST at the exact
[30:16] Speaker 3: same star for weeks at a time, spread out over
[30:19] Speaker 3: a decade.
[30:20] Speaker 2: And while you are doing that, you are not looking
[30:22] Speaker 2: at the atmospheres of TRAPPIST-1. You are not looking at
[30:26] Speaker 2: the red-shifted light of the first galaxies forming. You're not
[30:29] Speaker 2: looking at the ice giants in our own solar system.
[30:32] Speaker 3: It is a massive opportunity cost. The time allocation committees
[30:35] Speaker 3: are tasked with maximizing the scientific output of a $ 10
[30:39] Speaker 3: billion asset with a limited lifespan.
[30:42] Speaker 2: So approving a proposal that requires hundreds of hours of
[30:45] Speaker 2: observation time on a single target stretched over a decade
[30:49] Speaker 2: just for the chance of finding one exomoon.
[30:52] Speaker 3: It is an incredibly difficult logistical argument to win. It
[30:55] Speaker 3: requires an immense commitment of resources.
[30:58] Speaker 2: I picture it like this. It's like having a hyper-advanced
[31:01] Speaker 2: metal detector that absolutely can find a single gold coin
[31:04] Speaker 2: buried deep, deep in the sand.
[31:05] Speaker 3: Right.
[31:05] Speaker 2: But you only have five minutes to use it, and
[31:07] Speaker 2: everyone else wants to use it to find lost cities.
[31:09] Speaker 3: That is exactly what it's like. So the search for
[31:12] Speaker 3: the first exomoon has basically evolved from an engineering problem
[31:16] Speaker 3: into a political and logistical one.
[31:18] Speaker 2: It's not about whether we can find them. It's about
[31:20] Speaker 2: whether we possess the patience to look for them properly.
[31:23] Speaker 3: Exactly. We are so used to JWST pointing at something
[31:26] Speaker 3: for three hours and delivering a completely mind-blowing, full-color image
[31:31] Speaker 3: of a nebula.
[31:32] Speaker 2: Instant gratification science.
[31:33] Speaker 3: Right. But exomoon hunting demands a level of sustained, unglamorous
[31:38] Speaker 3: data stacking that goes totally against the grain of rapid-fire discovery.
[31:43] Speaker 2: It forces astronomy to play the long game.
[31:45] Speaker 3: But the foundation has now been laid. Kipping's methodology proves
[31:49] Speaker 3: that if we invest the time, the math will yield
[31:51] Speaker 3: the signal. We have the roadmap.
[31:53] Speaker 2: This honestly completely rewrites how I view the current state
[31:56] Speaker 2: of astronomy. I mean, we started today looking at a void, right?
[32:00] Speaker 2: The bizarre, silent absence of moons in a universe that
[32:05] Speaker 2: is just overflowing with planets.
[32:07] Speaker 3: The great missing pieces.
[32:08] Speaker 2: Exactly. And we look at how our initial attempts were
[32:11] Speaker 2: blinded by the slow, correlated drift of red noise. The
[32:14] Speaker 2: thermal heaving of the telescope itself masking the tiny shadows
[32:17] Speaker 2: we were so desperately looking for.
[32:19] Speaker 3: And we saw how the brilliant application of multi-transit averaging
[32:24] Speaker 3: tested on that hellish, tidally locked world of LP899C completely
[32:29] Speaker 3: stripped that noise away.
[32:30] Speaker 2: It is a perfect demonstration that the limits of our
[32:33] Speaker 2: discovery are no longer bound by the engineering of our lenses. Right.
[32:36] Speaker 3: They are bound by the mathematical sophistication of how we
[32:39] Speaker 3: process the noise of the universe.
[32:41] Speaker 2: So I want to leave you with a final thought today.
[32:43] Speaker 2: And It stems from those brutal orbital mechanics we discussed earlier.
[32:47] Speaker 3: The Roche limit stuff?
[32:48] Speaker 2: Yeah. We talked about how the extreme tidal shear at 0.04
[32:51] Speaker 2: AU would violently drag any ancient moon across the Roche limit,
[32:56] Speaker 2: literally shredding it into a massive system of rings.
[32:59] Speaker 3: Total destruction.
[33:00] Speaker 2: Well, when you consider that a huge percentage of the
[33:02] Speaker 2: exoplanets we've discovered so far are these compact, tightly orbiting worlds,
[33:06] Speaker 2: you know, hot Jupiters and close-in super-Earths, it forces this
[33:10] Speaker 2: stunning realization. Go on. If those planets originally formed with moons,
[33:14] Speaker 2: and those moons were subsequently pulverized by those tidal forces
[33:18] Speaker 2: over billions of years, the universe must be absolutely filled
[33:21] Speaker 2: with exoplanets sporting spectacular, massive ring systems.
[33:25] Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely.
[33:26] Speaker 2: We are sitting here looking for intact, spherical moons. But
[33:31] Speaker 2: what we might actually be surrounded by are the shattered,
[33:35] Speaker 2: invisible ghosts of ancient moons, just spread out in these
[33:39] Speaker 2: vast disks of ice and rock.
[33:41] Speaker 3: Hidden right in front of us.
[33:43] Speaker 2: They are out there right now, silently orbiting in the dark,
[33:46] Speaker 2: just waiting for us to find the exact right mathematical
[33:49] Speaker 2: trick to finally see them. It really changes everything about
[33:52] Speaker 2: how you picture the architecture of those distant solar systems.
[33:55] Speaker 3: It reveals a cosmos defined just as much by destruction
[33:58] Speaker 3: as it is by formation. It challenges us to, you know,
[34:01] Speaker 3: look closer at the debris.
[34:03] Speaker 2: Exactly. Well, thank you for coming along on this deep
[34:05] Speaker 2: dive into the math and mechanics of the cosmos. Keep
[34:08] Speaker 2: looking up. and will leave you to ponder the rings
[34:10] Speaker 2: of those shattered worlds.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.