One of NASA’s space telescopes, namely the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite / TESS, has discovered as many as 329 new exoplanets in 5 years. Photos/NASA
The discovery of exoplanets is one of the largest areas of astronomical research in the solar system today. A large part of exoplanet studies have been new tools that allow scientists to discover worlds much more easily than before.
A new generation of exoplanet-hunting tools arguably began with the launch of the (now retired) Kepler Space Telescope in 2009. KST ceased operations in 2018 and the baton was taken up by later instruments, such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). .
Launched in 2018, NASA recently released some of the achievements of TESS during its first five years in space. To date, TESS has discovered an impressive 329 new exoplanets, as well as discovering thousands of other exoplanet candidates.
To detect exoplanets, TESS monitors the sky and collects images totaling 192 million pixels each. To obtain one image data is collected every 30 minutes or less.
“The volume of high-quality TESS data now available is quite impressive. We have over 251 terabytes for just one of the key data products, called full-frame images. That’s the equivalent of streaming 167,000 movies in full HD,” said TESS project scientist Knicole Colón quoted from the Slashgear page, Saturday (22/4/2023).
TESS uses a method of exoplanet detection called the transit method. This is where TESS looks at the brightness of certain stars over time. If there is a planet orbiting the star while passing (called a transit), the brightness of the star will decrease slightly.
