TESS shows off the first exoplanet!

TESS shows off the first exoplanet!

NASA's TESS Artistic Vision

NASA's planetary hunter TESS reported on the first discovery of a foreign world such as a super-earth, which most likely suffers from the heat of a native star. The TESS satellite was sent to orbit on April 18 on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The space telescope analyzes several hundreds of brightest stars in sunny surroundings, trying to find tiny dips in brightness caused by the passage of earth-sized orbiting planets.

Scientists used TESS to find a new planet around Pi Table Mountain star (HD 39091), 59.5 light years distant from us. He lives in the same constellation and is a yellow dwarf (in second place in terms of brightness in the list of stars with exoplanets).

In early studies, the gas giant was found around this star, which is 10 times more massive than Jupiter. The world of Pi Mesa B is endowed with a strong oval eccentric orbit with a distance of 3 a. e. from the star. The new planet is 2.14 times larger than the Earth's diameter and is 4.82 times larger than in mass. Over Table was called Pi Table Mountain with orbit of 0.07 a. e. The density of Pi Table Mountain with corresponds to the picture where the whole world is made of water. But most likely, there is still a rocky core and an extended atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. They also believe that the planet is already evaporating due to the intense irradiation of the host star. Future research will allow studying the fuzzy configuration of two planets near Pi Table Mountain. The fact is that the oval orbit of the gas giant b strongly differs from the circular model of our Jupiter. It is possible that in the early history of the system some event occurred that changed the orbital path.

TESS continues the work of the NASA Kepler space telescope, which managed to find about 70% of the 3,800 known exoplanets using the transit method. If everything goes according to plan, then TESS will exceed these figures.

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