Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA’s planet-hunting satellite TESS locates its first exoplanet

Georgina Torbet
By
A hot gas giant exoplanet around a star with stellar oscillations

NASA’s planet-hunting satellite, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), was launched last year to search for exoplanets — particularly those which could potentially support life. The satellite will observe 400,000 stars across the sky and select a target from the new TESS Habitable Zone Star Catalog.

Recommended Videos

The catalogue is a list of 1,822 stars within TESS’s range which have Earth-sized planets in orbit whose planets receive a similar amount of radiation from their star as we do from our Sun. This includes a group of 408 stars which have planets around the size of Earth and similar radiation which can be observed in just one transit.

Related

“Life could exist on all sorts of worlds, but the kind we know can support life is our own, so it makes sense to first look for Earth-like planets,” lead author Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute, said in a statement. “This catalog is important for TESS because anyone working with the data wants to know around which stars we can find the closest Earth-analogs.”

And TESS’s search is already paying off. This week, astronomers analyzing data from TESS announced they have discovered a Saturn-sized planet.

A “hot Saturn” passes in front of its host star in this illustration. Astronomers who study stars used “starquakes” to characterize the star, which provided critical information about the planet. Illustration by Gabriel Perez Diaz, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

TESS’s first planetary discovery is the “hot Saturn” planet TOI 197.01. That means it’s a planet about the same size as Saturn but located close to its star, so it has a very high temperature. In fact, this planet is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in just 14 days.

“This is the first bucketful of water from the firehose of data we’re getting from TESS,” Steve Kawaler, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University, said in a statement.

The researchers are already planning for what other objects they could search for with TESS. “The thing that’s exciting is that TESS is the only game in town for a while and the data are so good that we’re planning to try to do science we hadn’t thought about,” Kawaler said. “Maybe we can also look at the very faint stars — the white dwarfs — that are my first love and represent the future of our sun and solar system.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
NASA laser communications test riding with Psyche sends back its first data
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 8, 2022. DSOC’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen, near center, attached to the spacecraft.

An experimental test of laser communications riding along with the Psyche mission has sent back its first data, in a demonstration of the use of laser communications for deep space missions. The Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC experiment, is attached to the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently heading toward an asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter following its launch last month.

Communications for NASA deep space missions are handled by the Deep Space Network, a network of antennae at three sites around the world that primarily use radio. But laser communications could offer 10 to 100 times as much bandwidth, so NASA wants to experiment with using this technology in situations like transferring science data.

Read more
Map of Mars shows the location of ice beneath the planet’s surface
In this artist’s concept, NASA astronauts drill into the Martian subsurface. The agency has created new maps that show where ice is most likely to be easily accessible to future astronauts.

One of the challenges of sending human explorers to Mars is that, due to the logistics of the journey, they will have to be on the planet's surface for considerably longer than the missions of a few days which have been sent to the moon in the past. That means future explorers will need access to resources like food, water, and oxygen -- and rather than having to carry months' worth of supplies through space, it's far more efficient to find ways to produce those resources on Mars itself.

That's the idea behind searching for water ice deposits on Mars. There's plenty of ice on the surface around the planet's poles, but most mission concepts are more focused on the planet's equatorial region. The good news is that there is ice present in these areas too, but the bad news is that it's primarily located below the surface and is thus hard to locate.

Read more
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will soon make its first flyby of an asteroid
An artist's concept of the Lucy Mission.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft, which launched in 2021, is on its way to the orbit of Jupiter to study the Trojan asteroids there. It won't arrive there until 2027, but the spacecraft will have the opportunity to do some extra science before then, as it will soon be making a flyby of another asteroid called Dinkinesh. At less than half a mile wide, this small asteroid sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it will be Lucy's first asteroid flyby.

Artist’s illustration of the Lucy concept. Southwest Research Institute

Read more