(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The team of astronomers working with data from the TESS space telescope have published the results for the first three years of work.
The number of found candidates for exoplanets amounted to 5210 pieces, of which 177 have already been confirmed by observational data from ground-based telescopes.
TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) went into space in the spring of 2018, and scientific observations began a few months after launch.
The telescope searches for exoplanets near bright stars close to the Sun, tracking periodic dips in their brightness during the passage of the planet across the disk of the star.
Primary interest of TESS are small planets, especially rocky ones, that may be in the habitable zone of their stars.
The telescope is most sensitive to exoplanets with an orbital period of less than 13 days, but is able to find objects with a period of more than 100 days.
In mid-2020, the telescope completed its main science program, having scanned about 75% of the celestial sphere
After that, it embarked on an extended science program that includes the northern and southern hemispheres of the sky, the ecliptic region, and areas previously observed by the Kepler telescope.
By 2021, the number of exoplanet candidates found by TESS has exceeded 2,400.
Now, the leaders of the TESS science program from the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the MIT summed up the current interim results of the work.
The number of found exoplanet candidates amounted to 5210 pieces, and 177 of them have already been confirmed by observational data from ground-based telescopes.
For comparison, the Kepler telescope discovered just over 3,600 exoplanet candidates in its first three years of operation.
TESS makes discoveries not only in the field of exoplanetology, but also in astrophysics.
It discovered type Ia supernova explosions in distant galaxies and the event of tidal destruction of a star by a supermassive black hole
The telescope also saw the optical afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, and even discovered possible exocomets.
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