If a moon has a moon, is its moon called moonlight? | Smart News

A few years ago, the son of an astronomer asked the type of question that only children and genius astrophysicists have proposed: can a moon have a moon? Juna Kollmeier of the observatories of the Carnegie Institution was unable to answer her child's question, but she understood that a study of this idea might help answer the question of how do moons form? and even reveal some of the hidden history of the solar system, reports Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo.

The results, which she co-authored with astronomer Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux, were recently published in a short article entitled "Can Moons Have Moons?" On the pre-print server arXiv.org, which hosts peer-reviewed research. The study, however, raised an even bigger question that has now sparked Twitter's scientific concern. How do you call the moon of a moon?

In their study, Kollmeier and Raymond examined what would happen to a small submarine orbiting another moon. According to the newspaper, they found that in most cases there is simply not enough space to allow a submarine to turn around another moon. Tidal forces pulled the little moon towards the host planet, tearing the mini-moon.

For a submarine to survive, it must be small, about six miles in diameter or less. It must also orbit a large, sufficiently gravitational moon to keep it in place and far enough away from the host planet to go into orbit. It turns out that several moons of our own solar system are perfect and can accommodate submarines, including Titan and Iapetus, which gravitate around Saturn, and Callisto, which gravitates around Jupiter. Even our own moon has the right size and distance from Earth to potentially accommodate its own moon.

The researchers write explaining why none of our local moons have any company moons that could tell us more about the formation of moons and planets. And, they suggest, we should see if the newly discovered The exomoon candidate surrounding Kepler 1625b also has his own moon.

"We're just scratching the surface here with how we can use the lack of submarines to understand our recent history," Kollmeier told Mandelbaum.

In the journal, astronomers simply call moons of moons "submoons". But Kollmeier tells Natasha Frost to Quartz this use was just a personal choice, and that there is no official word yet. Other terms for the moon moon have been suggested, including moonmoons, moonitos, moonettes and moooons.

"IAU [International Astronomical Union] will have to decide! said Kollmeier.

He has already appeared in the scientific field: the astrophysicist Duncan Forgan of the University of St. Andrews uses the term moon-moon in his recent article also on arXiv.org, which was actually published the day before Kollmeier's, evoking the possibility of a habitable moon revolving around the world. ex-candidate of Kepler 1625.

Twitter, for its part, has sunk into the satisfactory and unmatched term "moonmoon", suggested by New scientist magazine, and the same ones have already started. One of the reasons is that "Moon Moon" was already a popular meme many years ago featuring a confusing wolf, which led to strange mixtures.

Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura explains that the moon is gaining ground because there is something nice about "recursive places", like islands in islands, volcanoes in volcanoes and rivers crossing a sea. Laskow, for his share, do not vote for moonmoon. Instead, she says that she prefers either the sub-, or the meta prefix for recursive places, such as the submoon or the metamoon. But she recognizes that moonlit can be in orbit for a while.

"No matter what most people decide to call these fascinating places, that's what will hold," she wrote.

Whatever fate falls on you – Moonmoons, grandmoons, moon squares, nested moons or who knows what – astronomers need to prove that they exist before calling them.

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