A NASA spacecraft built to see alien worlds has completed its first two years of operation, and the foundations are in full swing: the mission is drawn in 2,241 new exoplanet launchers for cargo -science research.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched in April 2018, designed to spend two years raining over most of the skies. Each month, the spacecraft turns into a new strip of stars and scenes, looking for the character fragments in clarity caused by a planet going between a star and a telescope. In a new catalog, astronomers offer a detailed view of several spacecraft planetary candidates identified in the first two years of work.
“The interesting thing is to look at the TESS exoplanets map as a sort of to-do list – with 2,000 items on it,” Natalia Guerrero, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the paper, said in a NASA statement .
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To complete the new catalog, dozens of scientists went through TESS ideas of more than 16,000 targets to awaken planet candidates from other types of wonder, discovering 2,241 alien worlds that may exist.
The researchers also conducted initial experiments evaluating these candidate planets, capturing more than 500 other wonders as an alien world – sometimes a wonder in space, sometimes a quirk produced by the spacecraft’s activity . (The astronauts write that scientists are likely to find more things wrong with this as they examine the candidates in more detail.)
The first step for every so-called “interesting thing” is to prove that the ideas actually represent a planet, a process called to prove the planet. Determining an exoplanet candidate requires measuring both the size and mass of an object to ensure that the blip is caused by a planet, rather than something else. Scientists have determined that only 120 of the candidates described in the TESS catalog are up to date, according to a NASA report, because the process requires instruments that are always very busy.
That fact means that the catalog, for the size of which is a working group in itself, also represents a buffet of future scientific studies. “It’s an amazing job – a rich collection of exoplanet candidates to mine and study the community for years to come,” said Jessie Christiansen, a research scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute and co-author of the study. the same recitation.
Of those possible new planets, few stand out, of course – including discoveries that represent initial goals for the mission. Pi Mensae c, for example, a sub-Neptune that could host thick-skinned, was the first thing TESS’s mission discovered. TOI 700 is his first identified TESS planet that could orbit the size of Earth and rupture in its star’s arable zone.
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Other interesting discoveries are in themselves. DS Tuc A b is nearly six times the size of the Earth and may be just 45 million years old. The LHS 3844 ba will make a full rotation of its star in just 11 hours, although it looks like it’s just bare rock. The TOI 1690 may have been a white dwarf, a dense heart of a star that lost most of its light elements.
TESS is still monitoring; NASA extended the mission for another two-year period, which will keep the spacecraft in business until September 2022. And scientists will work with the existing data, including the new catalog , for years to come.
“Now it’s the community’s job to tie the dots,” Guerrero said. “It’s really nice because the field is so young, there’s still a lot of room to discover: those ‘Aha’ times.”
The catalog is outlined in a paper uploaded to the introduction server arXiv.org on March 23rd.
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