Humans discovered the first exoplanet in 1992 and have since found approximately 6,000 other planets from outside our solar system. Not once have those researchers found a moon orbiting any of those planets, however. That may have changed with the recent discovery of the first moon-like object in another solar system. 

The findings were published in a recent study. Kevin Hoy, lead author of the study and PhD student at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, says that this potential moon, known as CD-35 2722 B, orbits a brown dwarf instead of a traditional planet. It’s also approximately 90% the size of Jupiter and bigger than Saturn. This moon-like object takes 170 days to fully orbit its host. 

Hoy and other researchers used a fairly old trick to discover this moon: radial velocity analysis, which is used to detect wobbles in stars and is an indication that an exoplanet is nearby. Planets get dimmer as they move away from their host star, and exoplanets are found by viewing the changes in spectral shift.

This is the same method scientists used to detect the first exoplanet, and it was used to detect this exosatellite, which is the name granted to objects that have not yet been defined as an exoplanet or an exomoon.

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, this technique has produced evidence of satellites around a companion brown dwarf,” Hoy said in the study.

Schrödinger’s Moon?

The study’s findings aren’t without their controversy. Arguably, the biggest question is whether this is actually a moon. Brown dwarves, often referred to as failed stars, are far larger than a standard planet but did not have the chemical reactions in their core necessary to become a star. The exosatellite orbiting this brown dwarf is also bigger than all but one planet in our solar system and larger than most of the exoplanets discovered by researchers so far. 

Complicating matters is the fact that no one actually knows what a moon is. There is no standard definition from the International Astronomical Union, the authority that usually comes up with such definitions. Most people understand a moon to be a naturally occurring object that orbits a larger object, like our moon orbits Earth. 

There are some rules to this. The host object can’t be a star because then the orbiting object would be a planet. It also can’t be made by humans, or it’s deemed a satellite. The definition has expanded as astronomers find additional, unique types of moons. One example is Zoozve, a quasi-moon that would look like a moon from the surface of Venus but is actually an asteroid that orbits the sun and is close enough to look like a moon. 

For CD-35 2722 B, Hoy told me that one problem is the special nature of brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are considered substellar objects because they’re too big and dense to be a planet but lack the hydrogen fusion needed to be a star. They exist in a middle ground between the two, so it’s unclear whether something orbiting a brown dwarf would be considered a planet or a moon. 

That isn’t the only roadblock. “The object itself is at least the mass of Jupiter, which is far larger than the rocky and icy moons in the solar system,” Hoy said. “It’s not clear that anything that big should be considered a moon.”

Hoy says that the currently accepted IAU definitions group brown dwarfs in with stars, in that an object orbiting a brown dwarf of sufficient size would be considered a planet. However, this brown dwarf orbits its host star like a planet and CD-35 2722 B orbits the brown dwarf like a moon; therefore, it fulfills both the behavior of a moon and the definition of a planet. 

“Maybe when a definition for exomoons is written, objects like this will meet both the definitions of planet and moon, but we’ll have to see,” Hoy said. “Those terms are mutually exclusive in the solar system, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they wrote the definition in such a way as to preserve that.”

Until that day comes, no one is quite sure what to make of CD-35 2722 B, and until the IAU opens up the metaphorical box and comes up with an official definition for what a moon is, CD-35 2722 B could realistically be considered both a moon and a planet.

Sources told The Wall Street Journal that a sale could earn the three-year-old start-up roughly $10bn.

Stripe is reportedly in talks to acquire OpenRouter, a New York-based start-up that lets users access several AI models through a unified platform.

According to The Wall Street Journal (TWSJ), a transaction could earn OpenRouter roughly $10bn. It was last valued, reportedly, at around $1.3bn following a $113m raise in May led by Alphabet’s venture arm CapitalG.

Sources told the TWSJ that a deal could be announced soon. SiliconRepublic.com has reached out to Stripe to confirm the validity of the report.

Founded in 2023, OpenRouter is a new type of marketplace that offers users access to more than 400 large language models (LLMs) from around 70 providers. It routes requests to the best available provider, letting users shop around based on price and other factors.

It is claimed to be the first marketplace set up for LLMs, reflecting a growing appetite for AI models and a fast diversifying market. The company more than doubled its valuation in a year, after reaching the $500m milestone last June.

A number of other companies have also considered buying OpenRouter, sources further told TWSJ. The Information also reported on the buzz around the start-up.

OpenRouter co-founder and CEO Alex Atallah has described his company as an AI equivalent of Stripe, a payments processing platform with an array of different tools for businesses. Prior to his current venture, Atallah founded OpenSea, a similar type of marketplace for non-fungible tokens.

OpenRouter already uses Stripe’s services for billing, payment collection and tax, among other needs, under a partnership announced early this year.

Stripe, meanwhile, is also reportedly considering a joint acquisition of PayPal along with US private equity firm Advent International. Sources told TWSJ that PayPal is unhappy with the low-ball reported offer of $53bn. Stripe and Advent are considering their next move.

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Elon Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company is in talks to raise a $4 billion funding round at a valuation of $20 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The deal hasn’t closed and the terms could change, the WSJ says. At $20 billion, the valuation would be a significant increase from The Boring Company’s $5.7 billion valuation in 2022.

The startup has already built a network of tunnels under Las Vegas, through which Teslas shuttle customers to different stations. But tunnel workers have suffered serious injuries, and Nevada regulators said last year that The Boring Company violated environmental regulations nearly 800 times.

The Boring Company has announced plans to build tunnel networks under Nashville and Dubai. The WSJ says the startup has also pitched projects in Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

The startup spun out of SpaceX in 2018. SpaceX recently had the largest IPO ever, but its stock price has taken a significant dip since then.

Oppo’s next flagship phones may have made an early appearance ahead of their expected launch.

Newly surfaced live images appear to show the Find X10, Find X10 Pro and Find X10 Pro Max undergoing testing alongside Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro. This hints that Oppo is already benchmarking its next premium phones against one of its biggest rivals.

Over the last few decades, several mysterious hackers have captured the public’s imagination, but none quite like Phineas Fisher. A decade after their most famous hack, Phineas remains, by most accounts, the most prolific and public hacker never to have been caught. 

As part of our series on the biggest cybersecurity mysteries of all time,  we’re delving into the enigma of Phineas, the hacktivist who hacked controversial spyware makers FinFisher and Hacking Team. The latter, an Italian startup, was among the first to turn government spyware into a viable global business, paving the way for spyware makers such as the Israeli NSO Group. Phineas’ hack against Hacking Team eventually led to the startup’s demise years later.

Apart from Anonymous, an amorphous amalgam of hacktivists with a mixed track record of mostly stunt hacks designed to gather publicity rather than have real impact, Phineas is perhaps the most well-known hacktivist in history. Their story is made of impressive hacks and endless unanswered questions.  

Who is Phineas Fisher? 

Variously called an anarchist, a cybercriminal, a hacktivist, and a vigilante, the hacker has said they “use a lot of different names” for different hacking escapades. 

The hacks we know about were big enough to turn Phineas into a legend among hackers. “I would like to meet Phineas Fisher so that I could buy them a seven-course, three-Michelin-star dinner somewhere and listen to them explain how they turned Hacking Team inside out like a gym sock,” a well-known security researcher once wrote on Twitter. There’s even a song about them. 

Phineas first emerged in August 2014, when they announced they had hacked Gamma Group, the makers of the FinFisher spyware — which is where the nickname comes from. They publicized the hack via a Twitter account cheekily called @GammaGroupPR, leaking stolen data including mobile spyware, product manuals, and a price list. The damage was limited, and FinFisher carried on. Phineas published a post-mortem that doubled as a leftist manifesto, then vanished. 

A year later, they came back with a bang, hacking Hacking Team, another spyware maker. They took practically everything: more than 400 gigabytes including source code, tens of thousands of internal emails, confidential contracts, and customer lists. The leak allowed journalists to reveal scandals in Ecuador, Mexico, and Panama. Years later, Hacking Team’s CEO David Vincenzetti was forced to sell his company for one euro. For some former employees, Phineas’ hack was the beginning of the end. 

Phineas went on to hack the union of the Mossos d’Esquadra, which is the police force of Catalonia, publishing a post-mortem and a 39-minute tutorial video — consistent with their stated anti-police ideals. Their next victim was the ruling party of Turkey’s authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a hack motivated by solidarity with Rojava, a leftist autonomous region in northern and eastern Syria that Turkey was fighting against. 

Phineas’ last known victim was Cayman National Bank’s branch in the Isle of Man, a self-governing island between England and Ireland. The hack hinted at a different side of Phineas. “I look for illegal ways to make money in order to free my time so I can do something useful with it. Once I had that figured out, I started scaling it up and making more money than I need and giving the extra away,” Phineas said in an interview with activist Freddy Martinez. (Phineas donated at least $10,000 in Bitcoin to Rojava.) 

Phineas kept the hack — which happened in 2016 — quiet for three years later before announcing the “Hacktivist Bug Bounty Program,” an initiative to reward hacktivists who expose companies’ illegal and unethical activities. When Cayman National Bank confirmed the hack, it claimed it “was amongst a number of banks targeted.” Phineas confirmed they had been hacking several banks for years. 

That was their last public appearance. Their Twitter and Reddit accounts have long since been deleted, leaving no online trail. FinFisher never contacted law enforcement, according to a former company employee. The Italian authorities’ investigation into the Hacking Team hack ended without finding any evidence pointing to Phineas’ real identity. What I can say, from my own reporting, is that Phineas is alive and well — they have been in contact with me within the last couple of years. 

So who is Phineas Fisher? Taking their claims at face value, they’re a hacktivist with anarchist ideals, but also a cybercriminal. Could they instead be a fabricated persona controlled by a spy agency — Russia, say, which has a history of inventing hacktivists to muddy the waters after its own hacks? Phineas has denied being a Russian spy, and it’s unclear why Moscow would go after all of Phineas’ chosen targets. 

Their origins are equally murky. Phineas has name-dropped Spanish-speaking anarchists, wrote the Hacking Team post-mortem in Spanish, and followed numerous Latin American leftist accounts on Twitter. They told me their first language is neither English nor Spanish, though they have acknowledged living in a Spanish-speaking country. It’s all worth taking with a grain of salt. “Everything I say that contains clues about my identity is half trolling,” Phineas once told me. “I’m in the habit of saying misinformation.” 

It’s also possible that the Phineas persona was passed around between 2014 and 2019 and used by different individuals. But there is no evidence of that, and after 10 years of conversations, my gut says Phineas truly is the hacktivist they claim to be. 

Whether you’re buying an iPad Pro or a budget Android tablet, there’s no denying that tablets can do more in 2026 than ever before. The flip side is that choosing the right one has become a little trickier – but that’s where we at Trusted Reviews come in with our hand-picked selection of the best tablets.

If you just want a safe recommendation, the latest iPads and Samsung tablets are easy go-to picks. They’re great for most people, but they won’t necessarily be the best choice for everyone. If you’re shopping for a kids’ tablet, a budget tablet or something a little more specific, brands like Amazon, Honor and Xiaomi are well worth considering too.

It’s also worth thinking about the ecosystem you already use, especially if you want a tablet for productivity or as a lightweight laptop alternative. If you have an iPhone, an iPad will make it easier to move photos, files and messages between devices. The same applies if you use a Samsung Galaxy phone and pair it with a Galaxy Tab.

Whatever the tablet is designed for, every model that comes through our offices goes through the same rigorous testing process. We run industry-standard benchmarks to measure performance, test battery drain during gaming and streaming, and spend enough time with each device to understand what it’s actually like to use day to day. All of that feeds into our full reviews, giving you a clear idea of what each tablet is like to own.

Only tablets that genuinely impress our tech experts make it onto this list, so whichever one you choose, you can be confident you’re getting a strong device. If you already know what you’re looking for, we also have dedicated guides to the best iPads and best Android tablets.

Best tablet at a glance