How to determine an exomoon's sense of orbital motion

Abstract

We present two methods to determine an exomoon's sense of orbital motion (SOM), one with respect to the planet's circumstellar orbit and one with respect to the planetary rotation. Our simulations show that the required measurements will be possible with the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The first method relies on mutual planet-moon events during stellar transits. Eclipses with the moon passing behind (in front of) the planet will be late (early) with regard to the moon's mean orbital period due to the finite speed of light. This "transit timing dichotomy" (TTD) determines an exomoon's SOM with respect to the circumstellar motion. For the ten largest moons in the solar system, TTDs range between 2 and 12 s. The E-ELT will enable such measurements for Earth-sized moons around nearby stars. The second method measures distortions in the IR spectrum of the rotating giant planet when it is transited by its moon. This Rossiter-McLaughlin effect (RME) in the planetary spectrum reveals the angle between the planetary equator and the moon's circumplanetary orbital plane, and therefore unveils the moon's SOM with respect to the planet's rotation. A reasonably large moon transiting a directly imaged planet like beta Pic b causes an RME amplitude of almost 100 m/s, about twice the stellar RME amplitude of the transiting exoplanet HD209458b. Both new methods can be used to probe the origin of exomoons, that is, whether they are regular or irregular in nature.

accepted by ApJ Letters, 6 pages, 5 figures (2 color)

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Stellar obliquities in exoplanetary systems
• On the detection of Exomoons: A search in Kepler data for the orbital sampling effect and the scatter peak
• An alternative interpretation of the exomoon candidate signal in the combined Kepler and Hubble data of Kepler-1625
• Detecting exomoons from radial velocity measurements of self-luminous planets: application to observations of HR 7672 B and future prospects
• Conditions for water ice lines and Mars-mass exomoons around accreting super-Jovian planets at 1 - 20 AU from Sun-like stars
• Origin and Stability of Exomoon Atmospheres - Implications for Habitability
• Transits of Inclined Exomoons - Hide and Seek and an Application to Kepler-1625
• Detectability of satellites around directly imaged exoplanets and brown dwarfs
• Exomoon indicators in high-precision transit light curves
• Pandora: A fast open-source exomoon transit detection algorithm
• Photometric Search for Exomoons by using Convolutional Neural Networks