Huang says that TOI-849 b’s curious proportions are challenging existing theories of planetary formation. “Stars like this usually don’t get looked at carefully by our team, so this discovery was a happy coincidence,” Huang says.įollow-up observations of the faint star with a number of ground-based telescopes further confirmed the planet and also helped to determine its mass and density. Sure enough, they discovered a significant number of transit-like dips from a star 750 light years away, and soon after, confirmed the existence of TOI-849 b. Huang and her team at MIT, however, recently had some extra time to look over data during September and October of 2018, and wondered if anything could be found among the fainter stars. These are shared publicly with the general scientific community along with the TESS data for further analysis.įor the most part, astronomers focus their search for planets on the nearest, brightest stars that TESS has observed. These researchers get a first look at the data to identify promising planet candidates, or TESS Objects of Interest. As it scans the sky, TESS monitors the light from the brightest, nearest stars, and scientists look for periodic dips in starlight that may signal that a planet is crossing in front of a star.ĭata taken by TESS, in the form of a star’s light curve, or measurements of brightness, is first made available to the TESS science team, an international, multi-institute group of researchers led by scientists at MIT.
#Tess mission nasa picture of the day Patch#
TESS is designed to survey almost the entire sky by pivoting its view every month to focus on a different patch of the sky as it orbits the Earth. The project is one of NASA’s Astrophysics Explorer missions and is led and operated by MIT. Since its launch on April 18, 2018, the TESS satellite has been scanning the skies for planets beyond our solar system. The study’s authors include Huang and members of the TESS science team at MIT. The discovery is reported today in the journal Nature. It’s quite crazy to think what’s happening at the center of a planet with that kind of pressure.”
“Imagine if you had a planet with Earth’s average density, built up to 40 times the Earth’s mass. “This new planet is more than twice as massive as our own Neptune, which is really unusual,” says Chelsea Huang, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and a member of the TESS science team. TOI-849 b is the most massive Neptune-sized planet discovered to date, and the first to have a density that is comparable to Earth.
Surprisingly, this far-flung Neptune appears to be 40 times more massive than Earth and just as dense. Scientists spotted the planet circling a star about 750 light years away every 18 hours, and estimate it is about 3.5 times larger than Earth, making it a Neptune-sized planet. The planet, named TOI-849 b, is the 749th “TESS Object of Interest” identified to date. Now, a new planet discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, seems to buck this trend. Beyond our solar system, many other Neptune-sized planets, orbiting distant stars, appear to be similarly low in density. The “ice giant” planets Neptune and Uranus are much less dense than rocky, terrestrial planets such as Venus and Earth.
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