Tausende versteckte Planeten in alten NASA-Teleskopdaten gefunden
https://www.earth.com/news/thousands-of-hidden-planets-found-in-old-nasa-telescope-data/
Tausende versteckte Planeten in alten NASA-Teleskopdaten gefunden
https://www.earth.com/news/thousands-of-hidden-planets-found-in-old-nasa-telescope-data/
2 Kommentare
Thousands of planets are being found lately, what’s so special ?
Astronomer here! Holy clickbait article and website! However I scrolled through the mess of ads to find the paper [here](https://arxiv.org/html/2604.18579v1) so you don’t have to.
Now, this is the first time I’m hearing that [TESS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Satellite) / its data is “old” considering it’s an active mission that relies on its full data set. Specifically the name is the “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite,” because the way it finds exoplanets is by watching for ones that pass in front of a parent star and you see a tiny dip of light from it. [Here’s what this looks like!](https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/whats-a-transit/) TESS has found about 8000 exoplanet candidates to date and about 10% of those are confirmed. (Confirmation usually means using a second method to confirm there is an exoplanet there, but those are more time consuming.)
Now here’s the thing about exoplanet transits- I say candidate because just because you see one dip in a light curve doesn’t mean you’re done because you need to see another dip of light to confirm it, and this obviously depends on the orbit. If you were an alien astronomer looking for Earth for example, you’d only see one dip a year- if you were looking for Jupiter, you’d only see one every 12 years! So TESS exoplanet data remains relevant for a long time.
But anyway, this paper is cool because they know most candidates in TESS are around brighter stars, so they went and looked at fainter ones with machine learning techniques. (Astronomers have been doing ML well before it was cool.) There are obviously more fainter stars out there but the signal is tougher to detect there… but the team found 10,000 candidates from their pipeline, of which only ~10% were known before! So, more new candidates than all of TESS to date! They also did follow up of one candidate to confirm it’s an exoplanet, so some of them are very clearly real, which is also exciting. Will be cool to see what else is lurking in the new data set!