The first images broken by the NASA TESS Observatory – Quartz

A satellite observatory launched into space in April made its first images of distant galaxies, a promising sign as it begins to search for planets beyond the solar system.

Consider this amazing shot of the great Magellan cloud (right) and the bright star R Doradus (left):

The mission, called TESS, for the exoplanet survey satellite in transit, and operated by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will use all these stars to find distant planets.

Astronomers have used stars to help them spotlight planets since at least 1639, when Englishman Jeremiah Horrocks was able to predict and observe the planet Venus moving between the earth and the sun. The "transit of Venus" has become a critical issue for eighteenth-century astronomers and the work of their descendants follows similar principles. The four TESS cameras will follow distant stars to see if they darken as unknown planets pass in front of them, adding to our catalog of astronomical bodies.

The image above is only one of the twelve images collected during the first observations of the satellite. Here is the complete set, with some notable stars labeled by astronomers:

Over the next two years, he will monitor 26 areas of the sky for 27 days each, mapping about 85% of the sky. Every two weeks, it will get close enough to the earth to transmit its data to scientists, before its orbit recovers for a breathtaking view of the universe. The stars on which it focuses are 30 to 300 light-years from the earth; Alpha Centauri, the star closest to the Earth, is 4.4 light years away.

Scientists hope to identify thousands of planets, and perhaps most interesting, 50 rocky planets with similar characteristics to the earth. Once found, more detailed investigations can be made of these distant planets to understand what they look like.