We all have heard that there are hundreds of planets exist in space. Also, we have heard so much about the possibility of alien life on other planets. Astronomers from across the world are working hard to find the planets. And now, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered 21 planets outside our solar system.
TESS began searching for exoplanets in the southern sky in July 2018. Along with the 21 planets TESS has identified over 850 exoplanets that are waiting for verification by ground-based telescopes. The mission was designed to hunt alien planets, and the telescope, which is now halfway through its primary mission, has already collected enough data to let scientists recognize 21 new exoplanets.
“The pace and productivity of TESS in its first year of operations has far exceeded our most optimistic hopes for the mission,” says George Ricker, TESS’s principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The telescope has also mastered in the technique of catching asteroids and comets — even comets in other solar systems. It was only aimed to search for alien planets but it’s done more than that in its first year at work, as a new NASA video highlights.
TESS scientists expect the mission will catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets, as there are four large cameras installed in it to watch the sky for 27 days at a time. It mainly focuses on stars closer than 300 light-years from our solar system. Scientists believe that it will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting our nearest and brightest stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies.