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Gas Moons

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science-and-astronomy2 years ago

"Unraveling the Enigma: The Absence of Gas Moons in Space"

Gas moons do exist, but they are not found in our solar system. While most moons in our solar system formed through the bottom-up core accretion process, there was not enough leftover material to form gas moons. The top-down process of gas world formation also has limitations, as objects smaller than 3 Jupiter masses cannot form. However, there are oddities in the solar system, such as captured moons, that formed independently and later got caught by a planet's gravity. In the case of exoplanets, there are two possible gas exomoons, Kepler 1625b-i and Kepler 1708b-i, which are gas giants orbiting even larger gas giants. These exomoons challenge existing theories and may have been captured objects rather than true moons.