Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) tagged posts

NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to ferret out habitable exoplanets, but with hundreds of thousands of sunlike and smaller stars in its camera views, which of those stars could host planets like our own?

TESS will observe 400,000 stars across the whole sky to catch a glimpse of a planet transiting across the face of its star, one of the primary methods by which exoplanets are identified.

A team of astronomers from Cornell University, Lehigh University and Vanderbilt University has identified the most promising targe...

Dan Tamayo is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough. Credit: Photo by Ken Jones

Same class of algorithms used by Google and Netflix can also tell us if distant planetary systems are stable or not. Machine learning is a powerful tool used for a variety of tasks in modern life, from fraud detection and sorting spam in Google, to making movie recommendations on Netflix. Now a team of researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough has developed a novel approach in using it to determine whether planetary systems are stable or not.

“Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that’s predicting whether planetary systems are stable,” says Dan Tamayo, U of T Scarborough...