Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
SEATTLE — The next generation exoplanet hunter is coming into its own. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has already found eight confirmed planets in its first four months of observing — and some are unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
“The torrent of data is starting to flow already,” TESS principal investigator George Ricker of MIT said January 7 in a news conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
TESS launched in April and began science observations in July (SN: 5/12/18, p. 7). It was designed to be a follow-up to the prolific Kepler space telescope, which went dark in October after almost a decade of observing (SN Online: 10/30/18). Like Kepler, TESS searches for planets by watching for dips in starlight as planets cross, or transit, in front of their stars.
Unlike Kepler, which stared unblinkingly at a single patch of sky for years, TESS scans a new segment of sky every month. Over two years, TESS will cover the entire 360 degrees of sky visible from Earth’s orbit.
In the first four segments, TESS has already spotted eight confirmed planets and more than 320 unconfirmed candidates, said Xu Chelsea Huang of MIT. And several of them are downright strange.
Take the third-found planet, HD 21749b. Only 52 light-years away, it has the lowest temperature known for a planet orbiting a bright, nearby star, astronomers reported at the meeting and in a paper posted at arXiv.org on January 1.
That makes it a great candidate for follow-up observations with future telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021. Webb will use starlight filtering through the atmospheres of planets like this one to measure those atmospheres’ properties and search for signs of life (SN: 4/30/16, p. 32).
“If we want to study atmospheres of cool planets, this is the one to start with,” Huang said.
“Cool” is a relative term. This particular planet is still probably too hot and gassy…
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