A NASA spacecraft built to see alien world has completed its first two years of operation, and the tally is there: the mission is drawn in 2,241 new ones exoplanet candidates to study scientists.
Exoplanet Transiting Satellite Survey (TESS) 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 map of TESS exoplanets as a kind of to-do list – with 2,000 things on it,” said Natalia Guerrero, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the paper, he 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 kinds of wonder, discovering 2,241 potential alien worlds.
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 known as the planet. Determining an exoplanet candidate both the size and mass of an object need to be measured to make sure that the blip is caused by a planet, not 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 working group – a rich collection of exoplanet candidates for mining and studying 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 d it is the first identified TESS planet that may 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. LHS 3844 b making a full round of his star in just 11 hours, even though he seems to be 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 expanded 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 the role of the community is to connect 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 described in paper uploaded to the introduction server arXiv.org on March 23rd.
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