JWST hunts for an 'Earth-moon' twin in a habitable zone, but the star has other plans

The Moon played a major role in the development of the Earth. It stabilizes the planet, mitigates dramatic climate change and can even provide tidal warming that could have led to the first forms of life. It is therefore natural that we would want to find a similar Earth/Moon system elsewhere in the cosmos. But astronomers have been looking for one for years, in vain. And a new paper, available on the preprint server arXiv, from Emily Pass and colleagues at MIT, Harvard and the University of Chicago describes using the James Webb Space Telescope to track some of the most promising exomoon candidates, only to be foiled by the star they were orbiting.