NASA's new planet for satellite hunting shares first photo of space

The hunt is launched.

If we want to find life in the cosmos, it's a good idea to look for other planets. The Kepler telescope has done a fantastic job since its launch in 2009, but with this satellite reach the end of his lifeIt's time for the Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to take over.

On Monday, NASA shared images of "first light" from the southern sky sent back to Earth from its new fighter satellite to the planet. "First light" is the astronomical term used to describe the first time that a telescope acquires images.

However, this is not the first time that TESS has been broadcasting an image on Earth. NASA had already shared a two-second exposure image of space TESS had taken with one camera during his test phase. This image contained more than 200,000 stars.

The new images use the satellite's four wide-field cameras, offering a panoramic view of the southern sky assembled from 16 separate images. The star and galaxy band includes the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, and two bright stars that saturate the camera's detectors: Beta Gruis and R Doradus.

"This first light science image shows the capabilities of the TESS cameras and shows that the mission will realize its incredible potential in our search for another Earth," said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at TESS. NASA, Washington.

An image of all sectors can be seen below.

Capturing these images allows the satellite to search for "transits", the period during which a planet passes a star. When the data is analyzed, scientists will be able to detect the tiny hollows in the brightness of a star, suggesting that a planet has passed in front of it (relative to the telescope, of course).

To find new exoplanets, TESS takes pictures of space over a 27-day period, focusing on the southern skies during its first year. The northern sky will have its balance sheet in the second year.

While Kepler's sky examination focused on stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years away, TESS is getting closer to the house. Its sweep will cover an area between 30 and 300 light-years away. In the long term, scientists will be able to follow the findings of TESS with ground observatories and the long James Webb Space Telescope to tell us more about the composition of these distant planets.

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