David Kipping

And they saw the wobble as well.

So there's been a little bit of tension about...

analyzing the reduction of the Hubble data.

And so the only way in my mind to resolve this is just to look again.

We actually did propose to Hubble straight after that, and we said, look, if our model is right, if the Moon is there, it came in late last time.

It transited after the planet.

Because of the orbit, we can calculate that it should transit before the planet next time.

If it's not there, if it doesn't transit before, and even if we see a dip afterwards, we know that's not our Moon.

It's obviously some instrumental effect with the data.

We had a causal prediction as to where the Moon should be.

And so I was really excited about that, but we didn't get the telescope time.

And unfortunately, if you go further into the future, we no longer have the predictive capability because it's like predicting the weather.

You might be able to predict the weather next week to some level of accuracy, but predicting the weather next year becomes incredibly hard.

The uncertainties just grow and compound as you go forward into the future more and more.

Yeah, so basically from the wobbles of the planet itself, that tells us the orbital motion of the Moon.

It's the reflex motion of the Moon upon the planet.

Yeah, I mean, it's a five sigma signal, so that's at the slightly uncomfortable edge.

I mean, it's often said that for any detection of a first new phenomena,

you really want like a 20-25-sigma detection.

Then there's just no doubt that what you're seeing is real.