Since its launch in April 2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have mapped more than 93% of the entire sky, discovered 329 new alien worlds and thousands more exoplanet candidates.
“The volume of high-quality TESS data now available is quite impressive,” said TESS project scientist Dr. Knicole Colón, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“We have more than 251 terabytes just for one of the main data products, called full-frame images.”
“That’s the equivalent of streaming 167,000 movies in full HD.”
“TESS extracts parts of each full-frame image to make cutouts around specific cosmic objects — more than 467,000 of them at the moment — and together they create a detailed record of changing brightness for each one,” added Dr. Christina Hedges, lead for the TESS General Investigator Office and an astronomer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“We use these files to produce light curves, a product that graphically shows how a source’s brightness alters over time.”
To find exoplanets, TESS looks for the telltale dimming of a star caused when an orbiting planet passes in front of it.
But stars also change brightness for other reasons: exploding as supernovae, erupting in sudden flares, dark star spots on their rotating surfaces, and even slight changes due to oscillations driven by internal sound waves.
The rapid, regular observations from TESS enable more detailed study of these phenomena.
Some stars give TESS a trifecta of brightness-changing behavior. One example is AU Microscopii, thought to be about 25 million years old — a rowdy youngster less than 1% the age of our Sun.
Spotted regions on AU Microscopii’s surface grow and shrink, and the star’s rotation carries them into and out of sight. The stormy star also erupts with frequent flares.
With all this going on, TESS, with the help of NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope,
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