This NASA Telescope Has Discovered 329 New Exoplanets in Just Five Years

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This NASA Telescope Has Discovered 329 New Exoplanets In Just Five Years - SlashGear:

One of the biggest areas of research in astronomy right now is the discovery of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. With over 5,000 exoplanets known and more being discovered every month, you might think that this field is well-established - but in fact, it's rather recent, with the study of exoplanets only really taking off in the last decade or so. A big part of the explosion of exoplanet studies has been new tools that allow scientists to discover these far-off worlds more readily than ever before.

The new generation of exoplanet-hunting tools arguably began with the launch of the (now retired) Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, which ceased operations in 2018. But the baton was picked up by subsequent instruments, like NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, also known as TESS. Launched in 2018, NASA recently released some figures for TESS's achievements from its first five years in space. In this time, TESS has discovered an impressive 329 new exoplanets, as well as discovering thousands more candidate exoplanets.

[...] TESS uses an exoplanet detection method called the transit method. This is where you look at the brightness of a given star over time. If there is a planet orbiting that star when it passes between us and the star (called a transit), the star's brightness will dip very slightly. If you observe that dip in brightness at regular intervals, you can work out whether there is a planet there and how quickly it orbits that star. The amount by which the brightness dips can also help give information on things like the planet's size or orbit too.

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