Summary of the article from ScienceAlert reporter Michelle Starr:
Around a neighboring star just 635 light-years away, astronomers have found even more evidence of a moon absolutely livid with volcanoes.
There is a giant cloud of sodium consistent with volcanic activity, orbiting an exoplanet named WASP-49b, orbiting in turn a yellow dwarf star named WASP-49.
And how do we know that the sodium is from an exomoon? The exoplanet is a gas giant, unlikely to host volcanoes – and the sodium cloud is out of sync with the exoplanet’s orbit, but exactly what we might expect if WASP-49b had a rocky volcanic moon.
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Summary of the article from ScienceAlert reporter Michelle Starr:
Around a neighboring star just 635 light-years away, astronomers have found even more evidence of a moon absolutely livid with volcanoes.
There is a giant cloud of sodium consistent with volcanic activity, orbiting an exoplanet named WASP-49b, orbiting in turn a yellow dwarf star named WASP-49.
And how do we know that the sodium is from an exomoon? The exoplanet is a gas giant, unlikely to host volcanoes – and the sodium cloud is out of sync with the exoplanet’s orbit, but exactly what we might expect if WASP-49b had a rocky volcanic moon.
“We think this is a really critical piece of evidence,” [says astrophysicist Apurva Oza](https://www.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/does-distant-planet-host-volcanic-moon-like-jupiters-io/) of the California Institute of Technology. “The cloud is moving in the opposite direction that physics tells us it should be going if it were part of the planet’s atmosphere.”
Read the peer-reviewed paper here: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6b29](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6b29)