We’re finally seeing moons around planets in other solar systems, and we’re even spotting the dust clouds where new ones are being born.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
SaNDi-SHoP: Searching for Satellites'N'Disks with a Star-Hopping Program I. Analysis of the close surroundings of DI companions
arXiv · 2603.24796
The Takeaway
While we have found thousands of planets orbiting other stars, finding their moons is incredibly difficult. This study spotted potential moons as large as Jupiter and massive rings of debris around young planets, offering a first-ever look at the "wombs" where future moons are formed.
From the abstract
We aim to search for satellites and circumplanetary or circumsubstellar disks around directly imaged substellar companions, exploring their immediate environment to constrain the conditions for satellites and disk formation. We conducted a dedicated survey of twelve planets and brown dwarfs with VLT/SPHERE using a novel application of the star hopping technique. By building libraries of contemporaneous point spread function (PSF) references from nearby stars, we applied a frame-by-frame subtract