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NASA telescope discovers two new planets
ORLANDO: An orbital planetary research telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system has discovered two distant planets this week, five months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, officials said Thursday.
NASA's Exoplanet Monitoring Satellite, better known as TESS, has made early discovery of "super-terrestrial" and "hot terrestrial" planets in solar systems at least 49 light-years away, marking the first time satellite discovery since its launch in April.
TESS is doing a $ 337 million mission over two years to expand the known catalog of astronomers, called exoplanets, worlds surrounding distant stars. While the two planets are too hot to support life, TESS Assistant Scientific Director Sara Seager expects many more such discoveries.
"We will have to wait and see what TESS discovers from others," Seager told Reuters. "We know that the planets are there, in the night sky, and are only waiting to be found." TESS is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler Space Telescope, which has been uncovered for the last 20 years and lacks fuel.
NASA hopes to locate thousands of previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them the size of one that are most likely to have rocky surfaces or oceans and are therefore considered the best candidates for that life evolves. The scientists said they hoped that TESS will eventually help catalog at least 100 additional rocky exoplanets for further study in what has become one of the new areas of astronomy exploration. .
MIT researchers announced Wednesday the discovery of Pi Mensae c, a "super-terrestrial" planet located 60 light-years away from its Sun every 6.3 days. The discovery of LHS 3844b, a hot earth planet located at 49 light-years from orbiting its sun every 11 hours, was announced Thursday. "The composition of these planets is a mixed bag," said Martin Spill, NASA's chief scientist for TESS, during a telephone interview. The two new planets, which are yet to be examined by other researchers, offer the possibility of conducting a follow-up study, officials said.
"Of course, the whole purpose of TESS is to find these planets around these brightest stars to achieve this very detailed characterization," said Spill. With four special cameras, TESS uses a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic drops in visible light from stars caused by passing or transiting planets.
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