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Hundreds of candidate planets have been discovered to date in data collected and published by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TSS), eight of which have been confirmed, by far, by follow-up actions.We illustrate here three of the most interesting and interesting exoplanets. NASA / MIT / TESS
The Kepler mission of NASA was launched Ten years from hundreds of thousands of stars in our own galaxy, measuring the total amount of light emitted by each of them and looking for tiny changes, Kepler and his complementary mission, K2, had discovered thousands new planets around the stars beyond ours, including a considerable number of earth-sized and potentially habitable worlds.
If Kepler showed us that our galaxy was eine of planets, his successor mission, TESS – Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – will reveal the worlds in transit around the stars closest to ours. If there is a world similar to the Earth that pbades in front of its parent star in relation to our field of vision, TESS will reveal it. For the first time, we will be sensitive to the "Holy Grail" of the planets in our own backyard.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the TESS probe takes off on April 18, 2018, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. TESS is the successor mission to Kepler and K2 for NASA and is designed to search for exoplanets around the stars closest to Earth. Getty
Kepler's research was an incredible undertaking: she was looking for a narrow field of vision covering a distance of 3,000 light-years. His primary mission was to see this same field, continuously, for years. By encompbading more than 100,000 stars, Kepler looked for systematic and periodic drops in the total amount of light from each star. If a person were discovered, it would potentially indicate the presence of a planet, with the magnitude and period of the hollows corresponding to the radius and orbital distance of the planet.
But the TESS is different. Instead of looking at a region of the narrow sky, TESS explores the whole sky, sector by sector, to search for planets around the stars closest to us. If there is a chance planet aligned around any star about 200 light-years away from us, TESS will find it, providing its radius and orbital distance. In addition, each TESS discovery that gives us a planet also gives us a candidate system where future observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, can try to find potential signs of life.
NASA's TESS satellite will monitor the entire sky. which are 12 degrees, ranging from galactic poles to near the galactic equator. Thanks to this surveying strategy, the polar regions are seeing more observation time, making TESS more sensitive to the smaller and more distant planets of these systems. NASA / MIT / TESS
TESS was launched in April 2018, from the search for new worlds. His first scientific data acquisition began in July; almost six months later, he released his first release of data. During its existence, TESS should find thousands of new planets around a variety of stars, from gas giants the size of Jupiter to small rocky worlds the size of the Earth.
With its first six sectors studied, here. Here are some highlights of what TESS has found so far:
- : more than 300 candidate planets,
- 8 confirmed planets,
- including giant planets,
- and d 39; others barely larger than the Earth.
] But the numbers do not do justice to these discoveries. By examining some of these discoveries in detail, we can understand what phenomenal science can bring us.
Illustration of NASA's TESS satellite and its imaging capabilities of exoplanets in transit. NASA
Planet was Pi Mensae c, which revolves around a star very similar to ours. Just 10% bigger and 20% larger than our Sun, Pi Mensae is quite similar to our star, but its solar system must be very different. Blocking a small fraction of its light, Pi Mensae is extremely close to its star, orbiting with a period of only 6.3 days. It's about twice the radius of the Earth and almost five times more mbadive, implying that it's pretty typical of hot worlds between the size of Earth and Neptune.
The number of planets discovered by Kepler sorted by their size distribution, from May 2016, when the largest batch of new exoplanets came out. The Super-Earth / Mini-Neptune worlds are by far the most common, though virtually all of these worlds are likely to resemble Neptune with large gaseous envelopes, not Earth, with thin atmospheres. NASA Ames / W. Stenzel
But it's not typical; it's remarkable. In 2001, we discovered a great planet disturbing the orbit of Pi Mensae: Pi Mensae b. It was one of the most mbadive planets ever discovered: more than 10 times the mbad of Jupiter. Its orbit is very eccentric, farther than Jupiter from the farthest Sun (5.54 AU), but pbades close to Earth's orbit (1.21 AU) at its perimeter.
With Pi Mensae c now discovered by TESS, it is the first time we discover a near and far planet in the same system with so different properties and orbits. The dominant theory is that neighboring planets form in nearly perfect circular orbits, but to create an eccentric Jupiter mbad planet (or larger), something must have bothered.
The Pi Mensae system is now the most extreme known to date. in this respect, and the mystery of how such systems achieve this configuration will certainly be the subject of much research – and speculation – in the future.
Today, we know more than 3,500 confirmed exoplanets, of which more than 2,500 have been discovered. in the Kepler data. The size of these planets varies from larger than Jupiter to smaller than the Earth. However, because of Kepler's small size and the duration of the mission, the majority of Earth-sized planets are very hot and close to their star. TESS has the same problem with the first planets that he discovers: they are preferentially hot and in close orbit. NASA / Ames Research Center / Jessie Dotson and Wendy Stenzel; Missing worlds resembling the Earth by E. Siegel
The most extreme planet discovered is the LHS 3884b which is only slightly larger than the Earth at 1.3 times the radius of our world, but so close to his parent star he performs a revolution every 11 hours. At a distance of 49 light-years away, this world is so hot that its star-faced side could be filled with molten lava puddles in the hottest parts. The world is, at least in theory, so hot that the rock enters itself into the liquid phase.
Although it is unlikely that the atmosphere has such properties of mbad and temperature, it could create a thin on a continuous basis, depending on its nature. chemical composition on or near the surface of the planet. The characteristics of this system make it an ideal candidate to measure the spectra of absorption of the atmosphere. If he has one, we should know what he is doing as soon as we have the proper telescopes to look at him.
The candidate planets around HD 21749 are perhaps the most interesting discoveries to date of TESS and show us a solar system. NASA / MIT / TESS
Spectacularly, TESS gave us a star to watch: HD 21749. Only 53 light-years away from us. , this star is smaller and less mbadive than the Sun: about 70% of the size and size. As a K-clbad star, planets in orbit around it should not be subject to catastrophic eruptions or tidal blockage; If there is a world the size of the Earth at the right distance from this star, it would be an excellent chance for a living world.
On New Year's Eve the TESS team published an article announcing the discovery of a planet orbiting this star: HD 21749b, with a 36-day orbit and 2.84 times the radius of the Earth. This world, slightly smaller than Neptune, was confirmed by later observations, which determined that its mbad was 23.2 times that of the Earth, thus making it smaller but more mbadive and denser than Uranus or Neptune. [19659027] Using data from the first three months of NASA's publicly available TESS mission, scientists from MIT and other countries have confirmed the presence of a new planet, the HD 21749b, the third small planet that TESS has discovered so far. The HD 21749b revolves around a star, about the size of the sun, 53 light-years away from the planet. NASA / MIT / TESS