The light from a distant star is never steady. It shimmers like heat over hot asphalt. When astronomers pointed JWST at the star TOI 700, they saw this shimmer especially clearly: every 16 minutes, the brightness changed by a tiny fraction, just 46 parts per million.
This ripple isn't a glitch in the instrument. It's the star itself 'boiling': hot bubbles of gas rise to the surface, cool, and sink back down, like oats in a pot of porridge. Scientists had noticed similar behavior in other stars before, but here the noise was four times stronger than simple physics of light predicted.
It was this noise that threw a wrench in the works. The team was looking for moons around two planets — TOI 700 d and e. Both are rocky, both in the 'habitable zone' where water can stay liquid. When a planet passes in front of its star, the light dims for a moment, and if a moon is nearby, it adds its own tiny shadow. But the star's ripple was louder than the shadow of a moon the size of ours. The telescope would only spot a giant like Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, and only if it orbits the planet in more than two days.
But along the way, they did refine the planets themselves: their sizes are now known two to three times more precisely, and their orbital periods are an order of magnitude better. It's like trying to spot an ant on a trail and, in the process, measuring the trail's length to the centimeter.
Now the main challenge is learning to subtract this stellar flicker. If we can remove it, the telescope could see a moon the size of our own. That would open the door to a question many ponder: are we alone in the universe? After all, Earth has a moon that stabilizes its axis and tides. Perhaps such quiet neighbors are what make a planet habitable.
The star TOI 700 is a red dwarf, three times smaller than the Sun. Its planet d completes a full orbit in 37 days, while a year on planet e lasts just 28 days.
In the series 'The Expanse,' moons like Ganymede serve as homes for colonies, and here, a telescope is searching for such worlds around distant stars.