In the search for possibly habitable planets outside of our solar system, the NASA research satellite Tess made a first discovery: Tess had identified an exoplanet called TOI 700 d, which is comparable in size to Earth and possibly has liquid water, shared the US space agency on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Hobby astronomers helped discover
Nasa received help from amateur astronomers in the discovery. Tess initially misclassified the star that the TOI 700 d orbits. Therefore, its planets were initially thought to be larger and hotter than they really are. However, several hobby astronomers such as Alton Spencer, who works with the Tess team, uncovered the error.
“When we corrected the star’s parameters, the size of its planets shrank and we found that the outermost of them was roughly the size of the Earth and in a habitable zone,” said Emily Gilbert of the University of Chicago , The Spitzer Space Telescope later confirmed this assessment.
▶ ︎ Some such earth-like exoplanets have already been discovered in the past, in particular by the Kepler space telescope. For the Tess satellite, whose mission started in 2018, it was the first such discovery. What TOI 700 d consists of will now be investigated further.
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