David Kipping

This was at that edge.

I mean, I guess it's comparable to the Higgs boson, but the Higgs boson was slightly different because there was so much theoretical impetus as to expect a signal at that precise location.

A Neptune-sized Moon was not predicted by anyone.

There's no papers you can find that expect Neptune-sized Moons around Jupiter-sized planets.

So I think we were inherently skeptical about its reality for that reason.

But this is science in action.

We fit the wobbles, we fit the dips, and we have this 3D geometric model for the motion of the orbit.

And projecting that forward, we found that about 80% of our projections led to the Moon to be before.

So it's not 100%.

There was maybe 20% of the cases it was over here.

But to me, that was a hard enough projection that

we felt confident that we could refute the exit, which was what I really wanted.

I wanted a refutable, that's the basis of science, a falsifiable hypothesis.

How can you make progress in science if you don't have a falsifiable testable hypothesis?

And so that was the beauty of this particular case.

That's so cool.

Okay.

It's fun.

These are like little solar systems that we can simulate on the computer and imagine their motions.

But we are pushing things to the very limits of what's possible, and that's double-edged sword.