An exoplanet about twice the size of Earth has been found orbiting a star called Pi Mensae about 60 light years away. It’s the first world discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – a spacecraft that began surveying the galaxy just two months ago.

“This is one of the first objects we looked at,” says Chelsea Huang, a TESS scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We were immediately saying ‘hey this is too good to be true!’”

The alien world, Pi Mensae c, takes 6.27 days to complete an orbit around its parent star, Pi Mensae. That star is so bright, it’s visible to the naked-eye from a dark-sky site in the southern hemisphere. It was previously found to have a planet the mass of ten Jupiters circling it.

TESS works by watching thousands of nearby stars in the Milky Way, looking for signs of planets transiting them – miniscule dips in the stars’ brightness can give away the presence of an orbiting planet momentarily passing in front of them. Such a blip in the light from Pi Mensae was identified in the first month of observations beamed home by TESS, says Huang.

The team confirmed the presence of Pi Mensae c by examining separate studies of the light of its parent star made by ground-based observatories. This analysis revealed a tiny tell-tale wobble in the star’s motion that the researchers attribute to the gravitational pull of TESS’s newly detected world.

Based on the planet’s radius it’s likely a mini-Neptune with a gaseous hydrogen and helium atmosphere, says Hugh Osborn, an exoplanet researcher at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory in France. “Pretty much all the planets we find at that radius have this gassy layer,” he says. “So it wouldn’t look anything like Earth.”

Shortly after the first detection, NASA announced that TESS had found a second planet. This new world, called LHS 3844 b, orbits a small star 49 light years away. It is smaller than Pi Mensae c, only 1.3 times the size of Earth, but much hotter at an average temperature of about 532°C.

It is so close to its star that it orbits once every 11 minutes. The TESS team say that it may be the easiest planet to observe that is less than twice Earth’s size. That means it will be easier to check if it has an atmosphere, although it is so hot that it likely does not.

Read more: The galaxy is full of ‘water world’ exoplanets where life could evolve </s> Image: Science and Engineering Research Council J survey/C. X. Huang et al., 2018

Say hello to Pi Mensae c—a small, Earth-like planet located nearly 60 light-years from our Solar System. It’s probably not able to sustain life, but it’ll go down in history as the first exoplanet detected by NASA’s new TESS satellite.



NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on April 18, 2018, and it began operations on July 25. In an early test of its powers, the satellite nabbed its first light image on August 7, which we finally got to see this past Monday.

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As its name suggests, TESS is a planet-hunting satellite. Using its four 10-centimeter optical telescopes, the satellite repeatedly scans wide fields of space, and monitors the brightness of candidate stars. This data is then analyzed by astronomers, who look for periodic dips in a star’s brightness—a possible sign of an orbiting, or transiting, exoplanet passing in front of the star. It would now appear that TESS has made its first finding of this kind.

“Here, we report on the discovery of a transiting planet around Pi Mensae, exactly the type of planet TESS was designed to detect,” write the authors in their preprint paper, which was uploaded to the arXiv server yesterday.

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Image: C. X. Huang et al., 2018

Pi Mensae, also known as HD 39091, is an unusually bright yellow subgiant (dwarf) star. This star is visible to the naked eye and is located nearly 60 light-years from Earth. Based on data gathered from July 25 to August 22, the TESS team has concluded that Pi Mensae c, as the newly discovered planet is called, is a super-Earth. It’s about 2.14 times Earth’s radius and 4.82 times Earth’s mass. Sadly, Pi Mensae c is way too close to its host star to support life. A single year on this planet lasts just 6.27 days. The planet may be uninhabitable, but its discovery is a positive sign that TESS is doing what it was built to do.



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“TESS has begun to fulfill its promise to enlarge the collection of small, transiting planets orbiting bright stars,” write the authors in the study. “Such stars enable precise measurements of that planet’s mass and radius.”

This is the second planet to have been detected around Pi Mensae. Back in 2001, astronomers spotted an absolutely huge planet in this system, Pi Mensae b, which is nearly 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and the largest planet known to astronomers. This planet is so big that its surface likely glows, leading some astronomers to think it’s more a brown dwarf, a kind of failed star, than a planet. It’s also in an eccentric, or highly elliptical, orbit, taking 5.7 years to revolve around its host star.

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The preliminary survey of Pi Mensae c suggests it contains water, methane, hydrogen, and helium, in addition to a rocky, iron core. That’s pretty much all we know about this planet, but the authors of the new study say future observations made by the Gaia spacecraft and the yet-to-be-completed James Webb Space Telescope will likely reveal more about this relatively nearby exoplanet.

These observations may be far off, but astronomers won’t have to wait long for another opportunity to study this star and its planets. TESS is scheduled to collect five additional months of data from this system, allowing the team to improve its knowledge of Pi Mensae c and to search for additional transiting planets.

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This is the first of what should be a slew of TESS discoveries. The mission is supposed to last for two years, during which time 500,000 stars will be studied. If all goes according to expectations, the space telescope could uncover as many as 1,000 new exoplanets.

So that’s one down, 999 to go.

[arXiv] </s> ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - A planet-hunting orbital telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system discovered two distant planets this week five months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, officials said on Thursday.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as TESS, made an early discovery of “super-Earth” and “hot Earth” planets in solar systems at least 49 light-years away, marking the satellite’s first discovery since its April launch. TESS is on a two-year, $337 million mission to expand astronomers’ known catalog of so-called exoplanets, worlds circling distant stars.

While the two planets are too hot to support life, TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager expects many more such discoveries.

“We will have to wait and see what else TESS discovers,” Seager told Reuters. “We do know that planets are out there, littering the night sky, just waiting to be found.”

TESS is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years and is running out of fuel.

NASA expects to pinpoint thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth” sized - no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

Those are believed the most likely to feature rocky surfaces or oceans and are thus considered the best candidates for life to evolve. Scientists have said they hope TESS will ultimately help catalog at least 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study in what has become one of astronomy’s newest fields of exploration.

MIT researchers on Wednesday announced the discovery of Pi Mensae c, a “super-earth” planet 60 light-years away orbiting its sun every 6.3 days. The discovery of LHS 3844 b, a “hot-earth” planet 49 light-years away that orbits its sun every 11 hours, was announced on Thursday.

Pi Mensae c could have a solid surface or be a waterworld as the composition of such planets is a mixed bag, Martin Spill, NASA’s program scientist for TESS, said in a phone interview.

The two newest planets, which still need to be reviewed by other researchers, offer the chance for follow-up study, officials said.

“That, of course, is TESS’ entire purpose - to find those planets around those brightest nearby stars to do this really detailed characterization,” Spill said.

With four special cameras, TESS uses a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic dips in the visible light of stars caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of them. </s> The exoplanet that the TESS Space Telescope has discovered is known as Pi Mensae c, and is 60 light-years from our solar system.

Almost 60 light-years from our solar system lurks an exoplanet known as Pi Mensae c, and while there may or may not be life there, this Earth-like planet is nevertheless quite important.

It is the very first exoplanet that NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Space Telescope has officially discovered.

As the Inquisitr reported, TESS have also just released their first image — which shows numerous constellations and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds within it — which is a marvel to gaze at. While the TESS Space Telescope only began its work on July 25, between this photograph and the recent discovery of a new exoplanet, TESS is on a roll.

In its search for mysterious and faraway exoplanets, TESS spends its time scanning space to determine whether there are any dips in a star’s brightness. If there is such a dip, this is a very good indication that there may be an exoplanet that is either transiting or orbiting the star.

According to Gizmodo, in the preprint paper of their new study, the authors note that the TESS Space Telescope is already keeping its promise with its recent discovery.

Pi Mensae c is a reasonably sized exoplanet, described as a super-Earth. It has 4.82 times the mass of Earth, with 2.14 times its radius. This exoplanet completes its orbit every 5.7 years and is believed to be much too close to its own sun to harbor life.

While it is still much too early to determine exactly what this exoplanet may look like in greater detail, surveys taken through the TESS Space Telescope indicate that it has helium, water, methane and hydrogen, and also contains a rocky core that is comprised of large amounts of iron.

However, once the James Webb Space Telescope is fully functioning, this telescope and the Gaia spacecraft should give us a much better picture of the newly discovered exoplanet.

With a full two years of studying around 500,000 stars — and its recent find of its first exoplanet within just two months of beginning its operations — TESS should hopefully have many more discoveries like this to share over the coming months.

Details on the new discovery of exoplanet Pi Mensae c by NASA’s TESS Space Telescope have been published in Cornell University Library’s arXiv.org. </s> The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), NASA's newest planet-hunter, just hit another milestone: It has discovered its first exoplanet.

On Monday, NASA shared the space telescope's "first light" data, revealing hundreds of thousands of stars in the southern sky that it has set it sights on and confirming that, yes, things were working as they should be. That means TESS can focus its four cameras on stars, looking for slight dips in brightness which suggests a planet may have been "transiting" around the star.

It seems that data was only an appetizer though, as a preprint paper uploaded to the arXiv server on Sunday suggests TESS has already found its very first planet: a super-Earth orbiting the star Pi Mensae (π Men), nearly 60 light years away. NASA's TESS Twitter account announced the discovery on Wednesday, but said discovery still needs to be reviewed before it is validated.

If the data is validated, the new super-Earth, which was dubbed "π Men c", will go down as TESS's first discovery on its two-year mission to find Earth-like exoplanets around nearby stars. Its orbital period is just 6.3 days long.

And the new super-Earth isn't alone. Another planet known as "π Men b", about 10 times the size of Jupiter and with an orbital period of greater than 2,100 days, also calls Pi Mensae home.

But wait, there's more. Literally: More new exoplanets!

A second prepint paper, uploaded to arXiv on Wednesday, suggests that TESS may have already located an "ultra-short-period planet" around the M dwarf LHS 3844. That star is a little closer than Pi Mensae, at a touch under 49 light years away. Currently dubbed "LHS 3844 b", the planet zips around its star with an orbit taking just 11 hours. It is likely highly irradiated and thus would not have an atmosphere, but those assumptions will need to be tested with spectroscopy. Moreover, the research team cautions that it may actually be orbiting a low-luminosity secondary star.

The data will need to be validated before the exoplanet is officially added to our ever-expanding list of nearby celestial bodies. Both observations came via the TESS Alerts system, which is currently in beta, and allows TESS scientists to follow-up on planet candidates before the first TESS data release in January 2019.

What is most mind-boggling is that TESS has only just begun its mission. The space telescope launched on the back of a SpaceX Falcon in April and officially began observations in July. What wonders still await? How many exoplanets will we find?

TESS is just the start of analysis for many of these exoplanets and the data it provides allows scientists to dig a little deeper, revealing more about the planets they find using spectroscopy. If the first month is anything to go by, an influx of exoplanet data will start to filter out from the spacecraft as it continues to map the southern sky, hunting for planets.

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Fight the Power: Take a look at who's transforming the way we think about energy. </s> Scientists have characterised the first potentially habitable world outside our own solar system located about 31 light-years away. The super-Earth planet — named GJ 357 d — was discovered in early 2019 owing to NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission designed to comb the heavens for exoplanets, according to the research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This is exciting, as this is humanity’s first nearby super-Earth that could harbour life — uncovered with help from TESS, our small, mighty mission with a huge reach,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University in the US and a member of the TESS science team.

The exoplanet is more massive than our own blue planet, and Kaltenegger said the discovery will provide insight into Earth’s heavyweight planetary cousins. “With a thick atmosphere, the planet GJ 357 d could maintain liquid water on its surface like Earth, and we could pick out signs of life with telescopes that will soon be online,” she said.

Astronomers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands and the University of La Laguna, both in Spain, announced the discovery of the GJ 357 system in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

They showed that the distant solar system — with a diminutive M-type dwarf sun, about one-third the size of our own sun — harbours three planets, with one of those in that system’s habitable zone: GJ 357 d.

Last February, the TESS satellite observed that the dwarf sun GJ 357 dimmed very slightly every 3.9 days, evidence of a transiting planet moving across the star’s face. That planet was GJ 357 b, a so-called “hot Earth” about 22 per cent larger than Earth, according to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which guides TESS.

Follow-up observations from the ground led to the discovery of two more exoplanetary siblings: GJ 357 c and GJ 357 d. The international team of scientists collected Earth-based telescopic data going back two decades — to reveal the newly found exoplanets’ tiny gravitational tugs on its host star, according to NASA.

Exoplanet GJ 357 c sizzles at 127 degrees Celsius and has at least 3.4 times Earth’s mass. However, the system’s outermost known sibling planet — GJ 357 d, a super-Earth — could provide Earth-like conditions and orbits the dwarf star every 55.7 days at a distance about one-fifth of Earth’s distance from the sun. It is not yet known if this planet transits its sun.

Kaltenegger, doctoral candidate Jack Madden and undergraduate student Zifan Lin simulated light fingerprints, climates and remotely detectable spectra for a planet that could range from a rocky composition to a water world.

“We built the first models of what this new world could be like. Just knowing that liquid water can exist on the surface of this planet motivates scientists to find ways of detecting signs of life,” Madden said.

“If GJ 357 d were to show signs of life, it would be at the top of everyone’s travel list — and we could answer a 1,000-year-old question on whether we are alone in the cosmos,” Kaltenegger said. PTI </s> For the first time, scientists have discovered planets in galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Oklahoma identified the extragalactic planets about 3.8 billion light years away. The space observatory helped scientists find about 2,000 objects with comparable mass to the Moon and Jupiter.

SCIENTISTS 'GOOGLED' DATA FROM NASA'S KEPLER SPACE TELESCOPE TO DISCOVER NEW PLANET

The Oklahoma University team used a technique called microlensing, which identifies the gravitational signature of planets orbiting extremely distant stars.

“We are very excited about this discovery. This is the first time anyone has discovered planets outside our galaxy,” said Oklahoma University professor Xinyu Dai, in a statement. “These small planets are the best candidate for the signature we observed in this study using the microlensing technique. We analyzed the high frequency of the signature by modeling the data to determine the mass.”

Dai made the discovery with Postdoctoral Researcher Eduardo Guerras – their research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

ASTRONOMERS MAY HAVE DISCOVERED THE FIRST EXOMOON

Guerras said that the breakthrough highlights the power of the microlensing technique. “There is not the slightest chance of observing these planets directly, not even with the best telescope one can imagine in a science fiction scenario,” he explained in the statement. “However, we are able to study them, unveil their presence and even have an idea of their masses. This is very cool science.”

The Chandra X-ray observatory, which was launched into space in 1999, is controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

The Milky Way, the galaxy containing our solar system, has hundreds of billions of stars, according to NASA.

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Other scientists have also published fascinating space research in recent years.

In a separate project, researchers announced last year that they may have spotted the first moon outside of our solar system. By harnessing data from the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers identified exomoon candidate Kepler-1625b. The moon, which is orbiting the star Kepler-1625, is approximately 4,000 light years away,

Also last year, scientists used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and machine learning technology from Google to discover a new planet outside of our solar system. Researchers identified Kepler-90i, a hot, rocky planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. </s> NASA is saying "goodnight" to its pioneering Kepler telescope, which a few

NASA is saying “goodnight” to its pioneering Kepler telescope, which a few months shy of its 10th birthday but years past its expected lifespan, has finally run out of fuel.

The planet-hunting spacecraft, credited with discovering thousands of exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system, will be retired and left in its current orbit, a safe distance from Earth, NASA announced Tuesday. Kepler’s transmitter and other instruments will be shut down in the coming days.

Kepler was launched in March 2009 with enough fuel to keep it going for at least six years, according to The Verge. It far surpassed expectations, however, collecting data in deep space for more than nine years. In all, the telescope made more than 2,600 exoplanet discoveries, NASA said.

“As NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, said in a statement. “Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.”

Kepler searched for alien worlds by looking out for their transits, which are dips in the brightness of stars that could indicate orbiting planets.

“It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team, told AP of the telescope’s technology,

When Kepler’s stabilizing equipment began malfunctioning in 2013, NASA feared it was doomed. But the mission team managed to salvage the telescope after figuring out how to use the pressure of sunlight to balance the spacecraft. Once the fix was made, NASA approved a new mission for the spacecraft, dubbed K2.

Kepler continued to hunt for planets during its K2 phase. As Space.com notes, the spacecraft also studied “a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena, from comets and asteroids in our own solar system to faraway supernova explosions.”

In April, a spacecraft successor to Kepler ― NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS ― was launched.

“TESS builds on Kepler’s foundation with fresh batches of data in its search of planets orbiting some 200,000 of the brightest and nearest stars to the Earth, worlds that can later be explored for signs of life,” NASA said.

Calling Kepler’s mission “stunningly successful,” TESS project scientist Padi Boyd told AP that the retired telescope has shown us that “we live in a galaxy that’s teeming with planets.”

Boyd also noted that our exploration of the cosmos has only just begun.

“We’re ready to take the next step to explore those planets,” Boyd said. </s> • NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope, called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
• TESS could discover thousands of new planets relatively close to Earth.
• The telescope began its mission on July 25, and it will spend two years scanning 85% of the night sky.
• Scientists hope TESS will find about 50 small, rocky planets that could be habitable to alien life.

NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope.

TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is helping scientists detect and study new planets in other solar systems.

The telescope launched in April on a SpaceX rocket, and on July 25, TESS slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon.

The telescope is now scanning the night sky, staring down distant solar systems, and hunting for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

NASA just released the first science image captured by Tess, though it was actually taken in early August. The image above is just a portion of the full image — the bright part on the right is the Large Magellanic Cloud, while the bright star R Doradus is on the left.

The full frame captured a much bigger swath of the southern sky. The detailed image was produced using all four of the spacecraft's wide-field cameras for 30 minutes, while the portion above shows the view captured by a single detector of one of its cameras. (That should give you a sense of how powerful the whole telescope is.)

The image below shows more of TESS' "first light" image. Notable features include the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The brightest stars in the image, Beta Gruis and R Doradus, saturated an entire column of camera detector pixels on the satellite’s second and fourth cameras.

"This first light science image shows the capabilities of TESS' cameras, and shows that the mission will realize its incredible potential in our search for another Earth." Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said in a statement.

NASA plans to have TESS monitor 85% of the sky over the next two years, focusing on a new sector every 27 days. TESS will study 13 sectors in the southern sky the first year, followed by 13 sectors in the northern sky the second year. By the end of that period, TESS is expected to have observed about 200,000 stars.

To hunt for planets, the telescope will look for changes in a star's brightness level — an indication that a planet is passing in front of the star as part of its orbit.

Scientists anticipate that data from TESS could reveal thousands of new planets that are within 200 light-years of Earth. The team working on TESS even hope to find about 50 small, rocky planets that could be habitable to alien life.

Sara Seager, the deputy science director for TESS, previously told Business Insider that she expects to find dozens of Earth-like planets in the next few years, which could double the current list of potentially habitable exoplanets.

NASA has previously hunted for exoplanets with the Kepler space telescope, and detected thousands of them in a small part of the night sky. But Kepler has nearly run out of fuel and is currently in sleep mode.

TESS will scan a much larger region of the sky than Kepler did — and one that is closer to Earth.

"We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars," Hertz said in an April press release. "TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds."
NASA discovers its first exoplanet via the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope. Pi Mensae c, a small Earth-like exoplanet, is located nearly 60 light-years away from Earth.