TESS tagged posts

An international team of astronomers, including a group from the University of Warwick, have discovered the first Ultra Hot Neptune planet orbiting the nearby star LTT 9779.

The world orbits so close to its star that its year lasts only 19 hours, meaning the stellar radiation heats the planet to over 1700 degrees Celsius.

At these temperatures, heavy elements like iron can be ionized in the atmosphere and molecules disassociated, providing a unique laboratory to study the chemistry of planets outside the solar system.

Although the world weighs twice as much as Neptune does, it is also slightly larger and so has a similar density...

A planet observed crossing in front of, or transiting, a low-mass star has been determined to be about the size of Jupiter. While hundreds of Jupiter-sized planets have been discovered orbiting larger sun-like stars, it is rare to see these planets orbiting low-mass host stars and the discovery could help astronomers to better understand how these giant planets form.

“This is only the fifth Jupiter-sized planet transiting a low-mass star that has been observed and the first with such a long orbital period, which makes this discovery really exciting,” said Caleb Cañas, lead author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at Penn State and NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow.

Originally detected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft, astronomers characterized ...

Measurements from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have enabled astronomers to greatly improve their understanding of the bizarre environment of KELT-9 b, one of the hottest planets known.

“The weirdness factor is high with KELT-9 b,” said John Ahlers, an astronomer at Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, Maryland, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland...

Astronomers have detected elusive pulsation patterns in dozens of young, rapidly rotating stars thanks to data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)...