To weigh a star located billions of kilometers away, neither scales nor scales work. But astrophysicist David Kipping of Harvard University has discovered that it is possible to calculate the exact weight of a star using a moon .
If the star has a planet, and the planet has a satellite, and they both cross in front of the star, you can tell a lot about the star, including how much it weighs. The process is not easy. First you have to find out how much the light of the star is attenuated during the transit of the planet and the moon . In this way, three measurements are obtained: the orbital periods of both bodies: the relative size of their orbits in front of the star and the relative size of the planet and the moon in relation to the star. "Using these data in Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion we can directly calculate the mass of the star", clarifies Kipping, who insists that the method only works "if there is a moon in between."
