Concerning the possible exomoons around Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b

Recently, Heller & Hippke argued that the exomoon candidates Kepler-1625 b-i and Kepler-1708 b-i were allegedly 'refuted'. In this Matters Arising, we address these claims. For Kepler-1625 b, we show that their Hubble light curve is identical to that previously published by the same lead author, in which the moon-like dip was recovered. Indeed, our fits of their data again recover the moon-like dip with improved residuals than that obtained by Heller & Hippke. Their fits therefore appear to have somehow missed this deeper likelihood maximum, as well producing apparently unconverged posteriors. Consequently, their best-fitting moon is the same radius as the planet, Kepler-1625 b; a radically different signal from that which was originally claimed. The authors then inject this solution into the Kepler data and remark, as a point of concern, how retrievals obtain much higher significances than originally reported. However, this issue stems from the injection of a fundamentally diff..., , , Data behind the figures, analysis and tables in Kipping et al. (2025)

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zs7h44jh4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zs7h44jh4)

## === Description of the data and file structure ===

Each folder contains files concerning specific tasks. In reference to the folder name, \"H19\" refers to the paper bibcode 2019A&A...624A..95H, \"HH23\" refers to the paper bibcode 2023NatAs.tmp..258H, K22 refers to the paper bibcode 2022NatAs...6..367K and TK18 refers to the paper bibcode 2018SciA....4.1784T.

### Extraction folders

The extraction folders (*_extraction/) contain one or more notebooks that outline the extraction process, coupled to the relevant files needed in each folder. Within each, the file formats are:

**HST_H19**

* HST_H19_extraction/H19_Fig2h_bestfitline.csv: time (d), relative flux
* HST_H19_extraction/H19_Fig2h_rawextraction.csv: time (d), relative flux
* HST_H19_extraction/H19_HST_WFC3.dat: time (d), relative flux, error on relative flux

**HST_HH23**

* ...,