NASA’s TESS Finds More Than 2,200 Exoplanet Candidates Written 29 March 2021

SPACE reported that NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has completed its first two years of work and has found 2,241 new exoplanet candidates to study. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Researcher Natalia Guerrero, who is lead author in the study, said, “The exciting thing is to look at the map of TESS exoplanets as a kind of to-do list – with 2,000 things on it.” To produce the list, scientists went over TESS observations of more than 16,000 potential targets to narrow the list to the 2,241 potential alien worlds. Researchers also “ran initial tests evaluating those candidate planets, catching more than 500 other phenomena masquerading as alien worlds – sometimes a phenomenon in space, sometimes a quirk produced by the spacecraft’s activities.”
Full Story (SPACE)