[Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics] Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun.
Exomoon
Posted inImaging & Spectroscopy
The Science Potential of Characterizing Gas Giant Exoplanets with HWO
[astro-ph.EP] With the ability to directly image Earth-like exoplanets and search their atmospheres for biosignatures, the upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will also collect high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) reflected-light photometry […]
Rogue Worlds 3
Free-floating, or “rogue”, planetary-mass objects have been discovered wandering through the Galaxy unbound to any star. The origins of these objects remain poorly understood, and likely involve a combination of […]
![RMS vs bin-size of the residuals from our TTV fits (see Section 4.1). The four panels show the 2x2 different reduction-likelihood pairings considered in this work. The two jitter treatments find binning behavior worse than that expected from pure Gaussian noise (dashed line), and instead have a slope of ∼ − 1/3, similar to other NIRSpec PRISM results (e.g. Kipping et al. 2025). The inclusion of a GP to absorb time-correlated noise greatly reduces the slopes, as again expected.-- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/JWST-Excludes.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet
[astro-ph.EP] To date, even with JWST, it has not been possible to test for exomoons as small as the Moon. Only two reported searches for exomoons around bound planets have […]
![Evolution of impact-generated debris for the high-velocity impact cases. Rows correspond to different impact scenarios with varying orbital periods (Porb) and impact velocities (vimp), as labeled. Columns show snapshots at 0.35, 2.65, 14.69, and 18.05 hr after impact. Particles are shown in a midplane slice with |z| < 0.1 R⊕, and colors indicate material origin and composition. In the 2.65 and 14.69 hr snapshots, particles are additionally highlighted according to their final fate, identifying those incorporated into the disk and those that later escaped from the system.-- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/A-Formation.png?resize=1200%2C716&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
A Formation-Stage Bottleneck For Exomoons Around Close-in Rocky Planets
[astro-ph.EP] Massive moons around rocky exoplanets are expected outcomes of giant impacts, yet no exomoon has been securely confirmed.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
New Exomoon Detection Challenges Cosmic Labels
[ESO] Observations made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed evidence for a moon-like object in the CD-35 2722 system. Unlike moons in our Solar […]
![Orbital trajectories of two example scattering experiments. Left: An interaction that results in a free-floating planet-moon pair. Right: An interaction that results in a free-floating planet and a separate free-floating moon. The starting points of the bodies are indicated by the black dots. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Planet-moon.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inStellar Cartography
Planet-moon Ejections In Close Stellar Encounters
[astro-ph.EP] Free-floating planet-moon pairs (FFPMs) may form when planetary systems experience close stellar encounters.
![The lifetime of the system with respect to the innermost orbit P1 is plotted on a logarithmic scale for two Luna-mass moons. Alongside the maximum eccentricity reached by each moon is plotted (color-coded). The black-dashed line marks the βmax calculated earlier in the Eqn. (5). The gray dashed lines and labels indicate the MMR locations predicted using Eqn. (15). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Tidal-evolution.png?resize=1200%2C719&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Tidal Evolution Of Packed Moon Systems Around An Earth-mass Planet
[astro-ph.EP] While missions have long targeted terrestrial exoplanets within the habitable zone of their host stars, the number of exomoon candidates is expected to grow as next generation space-based observatories […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
A Scalable Path to Astrometric Exomoon Discoveries with the Nautilus Space Observatory
[astro-ph.IM] Moons orbiting exoplanets (exomoons) can be detected through the reflex motion they impart to their host planet, which is recoverable in relative star-planet astrometric time series.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
CARMApy: An Open-Source Python Framework for Simulating Microphysical Clouds in Planetary Atmospheres
[astro-ph.EP] CARMApy is a new open-source python code that performs bin-scheme microphysical modeling of clouds in exoplanet atmospheres.