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Somewhere among these grains of celestial sugar and puffs of cloudy powder, there is a planet, perhaps many planets, perhaps even Earth 2.0, which astronomers sometimes call the object of their dreams " Place not too hot or too cold, where Darwin's dice could have appeared seven.
Maybe even life.
On Monday, astronomers who operate NASA's new satellite fighter satellite, TESS, have released what they call the "first scientific image" of the satellite. Last August, they cover a strip of the southern sky showing stars and constellations that are galaxies next to each other, suspended like extragalactic fruit in the neighboring space.
According to George Ricker, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts astrophysicist George Tess has already identified at least 73 stars that can host exoplanets, most of them new to astronomers. who is leading the project. They must all be confirmed by other astronomers, added Dr. Ricker.
"TESS is doing well – everything we could have wished for!" He wrote in an email.
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In a research boom over the last three decades, led by Astronomers have concluded that there are billions of planets, including potentially habitable rocky worlds like the Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy. The frequent occurrence of such planets means that the nearest could be only 10 or 15 light-years away from here.
The work of TESS will be to sniff out these planets, monitoring the light of the stars for periodic gradation or blinking indicating that planets pass in front of them. Its designated prey are the planets close enough to the next generation of giant telescopes in space and ground to inspect more promising signs of livability or even life. According to TESS scientists, there could be up to 500 in the 300 light-years.
TESS was launched on April 18 from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and is now installed in a looping Earth orbit that takes it to the Moon and then to the Earth. . It has four cameras that look at the orange slices of the pole at the equator for 27 days at a time.
Among the 73 candidates, the TESS team announced Wednesday that it was a "super-Earth". She surrounds the star of the sun Pi Mensae at a distance of about 7 million miles every 6.3 days, a distance described by Dr. Ricker. like "a little too grilled" to be livable by people like us. The same star was already known to house a planet 10 times more massive than Jupiter with a six-year-old orbit. This leaves this star with two planets – one too hot and the other too cold.
Only a day later they unveiled another possible planet, a so-called "hot earth," surrounding a nearby red dwarf star known as HS 3844 in an incredibly tight orbit about one million kilometers from its sun.
"The discovery of a terrestrial planet around a nearby dwarf M during the first TESS observation area suggests that the prospects for future discoveries are bright." It should be remembered that 90% of the sky has not yet been studied by TESS or Kepler ", The authors of TESS wrote.
In other words, Gold Loop is still waiting.
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