TESS space telescope: 10,000 exoplanet candidates discovered in old data
TESS found thousands of exoplanet candidates. Now over 10,000 more are added, but their confirmation is pending.
(Image: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
An international research team has found traces of possibly more than 10,000 undiscovered exoplanets in the observation data of NASA's TESS space telescope. In total, there are exactly 10,091 so-called candidates, for which they were able to determine properties such as orbital period. Another 411 were observed only once, which is why no orbital elements were calculated. The list more than doubles the number of exoplanet candidates found in TESS data. At the same time, research leader Joshua Roth from Princeton University pointed out to New Scientist that the space telescope has a false positive rate of 50 percent so far. But even then, the number of known exoplanets could almost double.
TESS catching up
For the search, the research group combined several images from the space telescope to find exoplanets orbiting dimmer stars. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite searches using the so-called transit method, where exoplanets passing in front of their star reveal themselves through regular dimming. With the new approach, the maximum distance at which TESS can find exoplanets has been doubled to 6800 light-years. Most of the new candidates are so-called Hot Jupiters, i.e. gas giants that orbit their star closely within a few days. However, the group has also discovered possible Super-Earths. Roth himself expects that a total of 3000 to 5000 of the candidates can be confirmed.
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The search for exoplanets proceeds in stages; the identification of so-called candidates is an intermediate step. For them to be counted as exoplanets, each must be confirmed by follow-up observations. In total, we currently know 6273 exoplanets; almost half of them were discovered with NASA's Kepler space telescope alone. TESS is still significantly behind with 882 confirmed discoveries, but it has already delivered 7927 candidates until recently. Added to this are the over 10,000 now presented. Depending on how quickly confirmations follow, the research work presented now could therefore herald a long-awaited catch-up. The work, available in advance, has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
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