Join the exoplanet watch
Exoplanets are one of the hottest topics in professional astronomy today. Less than three decades after scientists discovered the first worlds around other stars, we know of more than 4,300 planets outside the Solar System. Another couple thousand candidates await confirmation.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS; a NASA-MIT collaboration) is actively adding to that tally. Astronomers predict that once, which measures the minuscule change in the brightness of a star as a planet traverses its disk. Thus far, astronomers have used this method to find about three-quarters of all known exoplanets. Not only does it tell us something about the planet’s size relative to its host star, it also provides a means for disentangling the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere.
