The Search for Exomoons

摘要

With exoplanet detections becoming routine, astronomers are now vying to characterise these alien worlds. As well as detecting the atmospheres of these exoplanets, part of the characterisation process will undoubtedly involve the search for extrasolar moons. In this work, we explore the motivations for searching for exomoons, review some of the previously proposed detection techniques and finally introduce transit duration variation (TDV) as a proposed search method. We find that these techniques could easily detect Earth-mass exomoons with current instruments and potentially down to Galilean mass moons with future space missions like Kepler.