TESS tagged posts

For the past thirty years, the star β Pictoris has fascinated astronomers because it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of formation. It is made up of at least two young planets, and also contains comets, which were detected as early as 1987. These were the first comets ever observed around a star other than the Sun.

Now, an international research team headed by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, CNRS researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/Sorbonne Université)1, has discovered 30 such exocomets and determined the size of their nuclei1, which vary between 3 and 14 kilometres in diameter...

A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion — a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3...

A team of astronomers have made the discovery of a lifetime that will help answer burning questions on the evolution of stars. The group is led by Evolutionary Studies Initiative member and Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Keivan Stassun.

Stassun’s team generated a new model that greatly improved the way stars are measured in 2017.

“Being able to combine all of the different types of measurements into one coherent analysis was certainly key to being able to decipher the various unusual characteristics of this star system,” Stassun said.

The model helps predict the types of planets orbiting distant stars—called exoplanets...

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering small planets around the sun’s nearest neighbor stars. TESS has so far discovered 172 confirmed exoplanets and compiled a list of 4703 candidate exoplanets...