Also ‘planet hunter’… More than 5,000 extrasolar worlds found by Tess

Doubled in 1 year… The number of ‘candidate’ planets is still small with 175.

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Eom Nam-seok = It was announced that the number of worlds outside the solar system discovered by NASA’s exoplanet exploration satellite ‘TESS’ exceeded 5,000.

This accounts for about 60% of all exoplanet candidates (8,414).

Although the ‘candidate’ tag has not been lifted yet, considering the fact that only 13,000 exoplanets have been discovered since the existence of the first exoplanet was confirmed in 1989, including candidates, it is a remarkable achievement that has been achieved in more than three years since launch in 2018. evaluated as performance.

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) ‘Kabli Astrophysical and Space Research Center’, which is in charge of running tes, the number of exoplanet candidates that tes discovered last year doubled and recently exceeded 5,000.

In the process of searching for the center of a stray star with weak brightness, a new planetary candidate was found.

Dr. Michel Kunimoto of the Cabli Institute who led the initiative said, “The number just passed 2,400 around this time last year, but now it has more than doubled.

Tess, nicknamed ‘planet hunter’, detects the presence of exoplanets by capturing less than 0.1% of the decrease in starlight when a planet passes in front of a star, so-called transit. The name Tess is also an acronym for ‘Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite’.

Candidates for exoplanets discovered by Tess are listed on the TOI list, meaning ‘objects of interest discovered by Tess’, and only after additional confirmation through other observations will they be removed from the candidate list and added to the list of official planets.

As of the end of last year, there are 175 TOI planets on the list of real exoplanets.

Considering that the number of exoplanets discovered by various telescopes, including the Kepler Space Telescope, is 4,903, which is about to exceed 5,000, it is still insignificant, but it is expected that it will continue to increase in the future.

After completing a two-year basic mission, Tess is currently conducting an extended observation mission until 2025.

The recently added exoplanet candidates were discovered during the first year and third year of the extended mission from July 2020 to June 2021, and were discovered by re-observing the southern hemisphere sky explored in the first year of the mission.

Currently, candidates for exoplanets are being observed in the northern hemisphere skies observed by the Kepler Space Telescope.

TOI Manager Catherine Hesse said: “With observations from the first year of the Tess mission extension, we have added many planetary candidates to the TOI, and it will be interesting to see how many more multiplanetary systems we will find during the remainder of the mission.”

eomns@yna.co.kr

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2022/01/24 10:58 Send