DESPITE a lot of searching, we haven't found a moon around an exoplanet yet. According to a new study, that could be because an exomoon can be ejected from orbit around its home world and turned into a miniature planet called a "ploonet". This fate may even befall our own moon one day. Mario Sucerquia at the University of Antioquia in Colombia and his colleagues modelled the interplay between exomoons and the gas giant planets they could form around. These worlds are between 0.5 and 1.8 times the mass of Neptune, orbiting stars at the distance Mercury lies from the sun. Their size and proximity to their stars makes any exomoons they have more detectable.
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