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Volcanically active exo-moons

While our solar system contains dozens of moons orbiting the planets, there is as yet no clear detection of a moon orbiting an extrasolar planet. A group of astronomers and planetary scientists, led by former UVa graduate student Apurva Oza, have a new paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal (http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10732) which shows that these exo-moons may have been hiding in plain sight. Absorption of starlight as it passes by the planet has often been assumed to be due to atoms in the planet’s atmosphere.