SPACE — NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered most of the currently known exoplanets. Now, Kepler’s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
(TESS), catching up with more advanced technology.
Reported by Universe Today, Saturday, November 4 2023, new research announced that TESS had discovered the validation of eight planets. Everything is a Super Earth. Next, researchers will confirm it, including the signs of life found, using NASA’s James Webb Telescope.
For your information, Super Earth is more massive than Earth but lighter than ice giants such as Neptune and Uranus. It can also form from gas, rock, or a combination of both.
The TESS planet-hunting mission has better objectives than Kepler. TESS was specifically built to detect exoplanets transiting in front of bright stars in habitable locations like Earth (the distance between the sun and the star).
Also Read: 10 Earth’s Twin Planets Found, Here’s What They Look Like
About 400 exoplanets have been discovered that have been confirmed, but there is still a list of about 6,000 exoplanets awaiting confirmation. There are only two ways to confirm all these exoplanets: further observation and statistical methods.
Thousands of exoplanet candidates are hiding in the TESS data, waiting for smart scientists to validate them. Further observation could help reveal it.
The Validation of Transiting Exoplanets using Statistical Tools (VaTEST) project uses statistical and machine learning tools to comb through all the TESS data, looking for elusive exoplanets. In the VaTEST project, scientists were not only able to confirm the planet, but also avoid false positives.
They were also able to characterize exoplanet atmospheres that are suitable for further study. A team of scientists presented the results of the project’s work in a paper entitled ‘VaTEST III: Validation of 8 Potential Super Earths from TESS Data’.
Their paper is under review in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia and is currently in pre-print stage. The lead author is Priyashkumar Mistry, a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Also Read: TRAPPIST-1, Another Solar System with 7 Twin Planets of Earth
False positives are a persistent problem in exoplanet science. TESS looks for small dips in light around distant stars thought to be caused by passing planets. One point is not enough. Scientists need several times, and there must be a rhythm.
However, there are other things that can give the wrong impression about a transiting planet, for example the eclipse of a binary star. Even a star’s natural variability can obscure its signature.
So, TESS has collected a huge amount of data to work through, sorting out the false positive signals from the real signals, and that’s what VaTEST does. In this paper, the team has validated eight super-Earths.
2023-11-05 14:40:00
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