David Kipping

And those two solutions are almost indistinguishable.

Now, ideally, we would be able to repeat the observation.

We'd be able to go back and see, well, if the moon really is there, then we could predict its mass, predict its motion, and expect it to be maybe over here next time or something.

With microlensing, it's a one-snapshot event.

Mm-hmm.

And so for me, it's intriguing as a way of revealing something about the exomoon population.

But I always come back to transits because it's the only method we really have that's absolutely repeatable, that we'll be able to come back and prove to everyone that, look, on the 17th of October, the moon will be over here, and the moon will look like this, and we can actually capture that image.

And that's what we see with, of course, many exoplanets.

So we want to get to that same point of

full confidence full confirmation the slam dunk detection of these exo moons but um yeah it's it's been a a hell of a journey uh to to try and push the field into that direction and um is there some resistance to the transit method not to the transit i just say to exo moons so the transit method is by far the most what the most popular method for looking for exoplanets but um

Yeah, as I've alluded to, exomoons is kind of a niche topic within the discipline of exoplanets, and that's largely because there are people I think are waiting for those slam dunks.

If you go back to the first exoplanet discovery that was made in 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, I think it's true at the time that they were seen as mavericks, that the idea of looking for planets around stars was considered fringe science.

And I'm sure many colleagues told them, why don't you do something more safe, like study eclipsing stars?

Two binary star systems, we know those exist.

So why are you wasting your time looking for planets?

You're gonna get this alien moniker or something, and you'll be seen as a fringe maverick scientist.

And so I think it was quite difficult for those early planet hunters to get legitimacy and be taken seriously.

And so very few people risked their careers to do it, except for those that were either emboldened to try

or had maybe a tenure or something so they didn't have to necessarily worry about the implications of failure.

And so once that happened, once they made the first discoveries, overnight everyone and their dog was getting into exoplanets.