David Kipping

And so everything just really lined up, and we spent months and months trying to kill it.

This is my strategy for anything interesting.

We just try to throw the kitchen sink at it and say, we must be tricked by something.

And so we tried looking at the centroid motion of the telescope, the different wavelength channels that have been observed, the pixel-level information.

And no matter what we did, we just couldn't get rid of it.

And so we submitted it to Science.

And I think at the time, Science, which is one of the top journals, said to us, would you mind calling your paper Discovery of an Exomoon?

And I had to push back and we said, no, we're not calling it that.

Even despite everything we've done, we're not calling it a discovery.

We're calling it evidence for an exomoon.

Because for me, I'd want to see this repeat two times, three times, four times before I really would bet my house that this is the real deal.

And I do worry...

As I said, perhaps that's my own self-skepticism going too far.

But I think it was the right decision.

And since that paper came out, there has been continuous interest in the subject.

Another team independently analyzed that star and recovered actually pretty much exactly the same results as us, the same dip.

the same wobble of the planet.

And a third team looked at it and they actually got something different.

They saw the dip was diminished compared to what we saw.

They saw a little hint of a dip, but not as pronounced as what we saw.