The influence of hypothetical exomoons on planetary thermal phase curves

Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

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Received: 3 May 2025
Accepted: 6 February 2026

Abstract

Context. More than 200 moons exist in our Solar System, yet no exomoon has been confirmed to date. While the innermost two planets of the Solar System lack natural satellites and most studies favour the existence of exomoons around long-period planets, some theoretical studies that take tidal dissipation, orbital decay, and migration processes into account suggest that exomoons may survive around short-period exoplanets.

Aims. We investigated the impact of exomoons on planetary thermal phase curves and assessed their detectability within a theoretical framework.

Methods. We simulated the thermal phase curves of exomoon-exoplanet systems, including mutual transits and occultations, and explored their dependence on planetary orbital periods across a wide range of systems.

Results. Close-in airless exomoons maintain large day–night temperature contrasts, amplifying the thermal phase-curve signal of the system. When the exomoon transits or is occulted by the exoplanet, the transit depth varies with the planetary phase, and the occultation depth varies with the exomoon’s phase. The maximum occultation depth can reach ∼20 ppm for long-period systems. For short-period planets, the signal can reach up to ∼100 ppm, although such configurations may not be dynamically stable over long timescales.

Conclusions. If exomoons are not accounted for, the planetary temperature distribution retrieved from observed thermal phase curves may overestimate the planetary day–night temperature contrast and underestimate the planetary horizontal heat transport. In principle, the periodic exomoon-exoplanet mutual occultation signal could be extracted using methods such as box-fitting least squares, providing a framework for future observational studies and instrument planning.