Launched in 2018, the NASA recently published Some figures on the accomplishments of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in its first five years in space. In this time, Tess has discovered an impressive 329 new exoplanetsin addition to discovering thousands of other candidate exoplanets.
How do you explain Slash Gearthese candidates come from early data suggesting a planet might be present, but where more data is needed to verify that it definitely exists.
To detect these worlds, TESS monitors the sky and collects images with a total of 192 million pixels each. With one of these images collected every 30 minutes or less, that’s a lot of data.
Knicole Colón, TESS project scientist, explained: “The volume of high-quality TESS data now available is quite impressive. We have over 251 terabytes just for one major data product, called full-frame images. That’s the equivalent of streaming 167,000 movies in Full HD.”.
How TESS detects exoplanets
TESS uses a method of detecting exoplanets called the transit method. This is where you observe the brightness of a given star over time.
If there is a planet orbiting that star as it passes between us and the star (called a transit), the star’s brightness will dim very slightly. If you watch that drop in brightness at regular intervals, you can determine if there’s a planet there and how fast that star is orbiting. The amount by which the brightness falls can also help give information about things like the size or orbit of the planet.
However, to see these dips in brightness, you have to look at the star in question at several different points. First, you should see the star at its usual brightness, then during the transit, and then after the transit.
Scientists like to watch these transits several times to be sure that what they see is definitely due to the presence of a planet and not some other factor. That’s why TESS collects so much data, because it needs to look at a lot of stars and see them at multiple points in time to know if they have planets orbiting them.
