Since the start of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission in 2018, NASA’s exoplanet-hunting satellite has grown its catalog impressively. This Friday (21), the US space agency announced that the list already had more than 5,000 TOI (short for “TESS Objects of Interest”).
The detection comes primarily from the Faint Star Search led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) postdoctoral fellow Michelle Kunimoto.
The number of TESS exoplanet candidates doubled in one year
“This time last year, TESS found more than 2,400 TOI. Today, TESS has more than double that number — a huge testament to the mission and all teams exploring data for a new planet.” “I’m excited to see thousands more in the years to come.”
Currently on an extended mission, TESS is observing the Northern Hemisphere and the ecliptic plane, including regions of the sky previously observed by the Kepler and K2 missions. The TOIs added in late December are from the third year of the TESS mission, which runs from July 2020 to June 2021.
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“With data from the first year of extended missions, we found dozens of additional candidates for TOI identified during the main mission,” said TOI manager Katharine Hesse. “I’m excited to see how many multi-planetary systems we can discover during the remainder of the extended mission and the next few years with TESS.” .
There are already 175 confirmed planets
Finding more exoplanet candidates and adding them to the TOI catalog is only the first step. In the coming months, astronomers around the world will study each of these TOIs to confirm that they are indeed planets. In this way, the list of confirmed exoplanets from the TESS mission (175, so far) will continue to grow.
TESS is a mission led and operated by MIT and managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, and has partners such as Northrop Grumman and the Centers for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian, as well as more than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories around the world.
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