“Moons are where planets were in the 1990s,” predicted René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research a few years ago. “We’re on the brink.”

Heller was predicting that we were close to the first discoveries of exomoons: moons that orbit extrasolar planets outside our solar system. When a possible exomoon detection was announced in 2017, Heller’s prediction was proved correct. Not only had we found a candidate moon, but its properties defied our formation theories just as with the discoveries of the first exoplanets.

However, a paper published in Science this month has proposed a method for building this most unusual of moons.

As we move away from the sun, the planets of our solar system become mobbed with moons. How these small worlds formed is attributed to three different processes:

The most extensive moon real estate orbits our gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The majority of these moons are thought to have been born during the planets’ own formation, forming in disks of gas, dust and ice that circled the young worlds. These circumplanetary disks are like miniaturised versions of the protoplanetary disks that circle young stars and give rise to planets.

One exception to this is Neptune’s moon, Triton, which orbits in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation. This retrograde path would not be expected to arise if Triton has formed out of a circumplanetary disk around Neptune, which always rotate the same direction as the forming planet. Instead, Triton was likely a dwarf planet that was snagged by Neptune’s gravity during a chance encounter.

The capture scenario has also been proposed for the two moons of Mars. The lumpy satellites resemble asteroids and may have been born in the asteroid belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter. However, both moons orbit the red planet in circular orbits that sit in the same plane, pointing to a more disk-like formation method. Although Mars is too small to have had a substantial circumplanetary disk during formation, a giant impact later in its history could have thrown debris into orbit. This debris disk could then have coalesced into the two moons.

Such a violent start to Mars’s moons would mimic the beginnings of our own moon.… Read more