The exoplanet that the TESS Space Telescope has discovered is known as Pi Mensae c, and is 60 light-years from our solar system.

Almost 60 light-years from our solar system lurks an exoplanet known as Pi Mensae c, and while there may or may not be life there, this Earth-like planet is nevertheless quite important.

It is the very first exoplanet that NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Space Telescope has officially discovered.

As the Inquisitr reported, TESS have also just released their first image — which shows numerous constellations and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds within it — which is a marvel to gaze at. While the TESS Space Telescope only began its work on July 25, between this photograph and the recent discovery of a new exoplanet, TESS is on a roll.

In its search for mysterious and faraway exoplanets, TESS spends its time scanning space to determine whether there are any dips in a star’s brightness. If there is such a dip, this is a very good indication that there may be an exoplanet that is either transiting or orbiting the star.

According to Gizmodo, in the preprint paper of their new study, the authors note that the TESS Space Telescope is already keeping its promise with its recent discovery.

Pi Mensae c is a reasonably sized exoplanet, described as a super-Earth. It has 4.82 times the mass of Earth, with 2.14 times its radius. This exoplanet completes its orbit every 5.7 years and is believed to be much too close to its own sun to harbor life.

While it is still much too early to determine exactly what this exoplanet may look like in greater detail, surveys taken through the TESS Space Telescope indicate that it has helium, water, methane and hydrogen, and also contains a rocky core that is comprised of large amounts of iron.

However, once the James Webb Space Telescope is fully functioning, this telescope and the Gaia spacecraft should give us a much better picture of the newly discovered exoplanet.

With a full two years of studying around 500,000 stars — and its recent find of its first exoplanet within just two months of beginning its operations — TESS should hopefully have many more discoveries like this to share over the coming months.

Details on the new discovery of exoplanet Pi Mensae c by NASA’s TESS Space Telescope have been published in Cornell University Library’s arXiv.org.</s>Image: Science and Engineering Research Council J survey/C. X. Huang et al., 2018

Say hello to Pi Mensae c—a small, Earth-like planet located nearly 60 light-years from our Solar System. It’s probably not able to sustain life, but it’ll go down in history as the first exoplanet detected by NASA’s new TESS satellite.



NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on April 18, 2018, and it began operations on July 25. In an early test of its powers, the satellite nabbed its first light image on August 7, which we finally got to see this past Monday.

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As its name suggests, TESS is a planet-hunting satellite. Using its four 10-centimeter optical telescopes, the satellite repeatedly scans wide fields of space, and monitors the brightness of candidate stars. This data is then analyzed by astronomers, who look for periodic dips in a star’s brightness—a possible sign of an orbiting, or transiting, exoplanet passing in front of the star. It would now appear that TESS has made its first finding of this kind.

“Here, we report on the discovery of a transiting planet around Pi Mensae, exactly the type of planet TESS was designed to detect,” write the authors in their preprint paper, which was uploaded to the arXiv server yesterday.

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Image: C. X. Huang et al., 2018

Pi Mensae, also known as HD 39091, is an unusually bright yellow subgiant (dwarf) star. This star is visible to the naked eye and is located nearly 60 light-years from Earth. Based on data gathered from July 25 to August 22, the TESS team has concluded that Pi Mensae c, as the newly discovered planet is called, is a super-Earth. It’s about 2.14 times Earth’s radius and 4.82 times Earth’s mass. Sadly, Pi Mensae c is way too close to its host star to support life. A single year on this planet lasts just 6.27 days. The planet may be uninhabitable, but its discovery is a positive sign that TESS is doing what it was built to do.



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“TESS has begun to fulfill its promise to enlarge the collection of small, transiting planets orbiting bright stars,” write the authors in the study. “Such stars enable precise measurements of that planet’s mass and radius.”

This is the second planet to have been detected around Pi Mensae. Back in 2001, astronomers spotted an absolutely huge planet in this system, Pi Mensae b, which is nearly 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and the largest planet known to astronomers. This planet is so big that its surface likely glows, leading some astronomers to think it’s more a brown dwarf, a kind of failed star, than a planet. It’s also in an eccentric, or highly elliptical, orbit, taking 5.7 years to revolve around its host star.

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The preliminary survey of Pi Mensae c suggests it contains water, methane, hydrogen, and helium, in addition to a rocky, iron core. That’s pretty much all we know about this planet, but the authors of the new study say future observations made by the Gaia spacecraft and the yet-to-be-completed James Webb Space Telescope will likely reveal more about this relatively nearby exoplanet.

These observations may be far off, but astronomers won’t have to wait long for another opportunity to study this star and its planets. TESS is scheduled to collect five additional months of data from this system, allowing the team to improve its knowledge of Pi Mensae c and to search for additional transiting planets.

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This is the first of what should be a slew of TESS discoveries. The mission is supposed to last for two years, during which time 500,000 stars will be studied. If all goes according to expectations, the space telescope could uncover as many as 1,000 new exoplanets.

So that’s one down, 999 to go.

[arXiv]</s>In the two years since astronomers confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet just outside the Solar System, scientists have scrambled to determine Proxima b’s habitability.

Unfortunately, multiple studies proved disheartening, often indicating that the orb’s sun experiences too much flare activity to sustain an atmosphere or liquid water on its surface.

New NASA-led research, however, suggests Proxima b—which orbits red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the closest known star to our galaxy—could have enough water to support life.

Don’t get too excited about meeting the intergalactic neighbors just yet, though.

As indicated by those earlier studies, there is a lot working against aliens’ favor on Proxima b, which is just 1.3 times the mass of Earth.

While the planet looks good on paper, its history remains unclear: It probably experienced a runaway greenhouse effect (ultimately boiling away any oceans), and would have been pelted with intense radiation (X-ray and extreme ultraviolet fluxes) and solar wind.

It could also be home to an entirely new category of being.

“First and foremost, we don’t know whether Prox b even has an atmosphere and if it does, whether it has any water. Without those, life as we know it cannot exist,” study co-author Anthony Del Genio, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Universe Today.

“It could be [that] Prox b formed initially with no atmosphere, or that it formed with an atmosphere but in a stellar system that was water-poor,” he continued. “Or it could have formed with a modest atmosphere and lots of water. Or it could have formed with a very thick atmosphere. We just don’t know yet.”

The research—conducted by Del Genio and colleagues at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Columbia University, and IT firm Trinnovim LLC—was published in the journal Astrobiology.

There are any number of reasons to assume no one lives on Proxima b, including the fact that M stars like Proxima Centauri tend to be too small, cool, bright, and active to sustain a habitable climate.

But that’s no reason to give up on the hunt.

Using a little imagination and a lot of high-tech software, Del Genio & Co. conceptualized Proxima b as having an atmosphere and water, in an effort to understand how those factors might produce habitable conditions* at the surface.

*Defined as: warm enough to sustain liquid water, but not so hot as to evaporate it all.

The team modeled a range of potential atmospheres, including ones like Earth (dominated by nitrogen with small amounts of CO2) and Mars (pure CO2).

According to Universe Today, they also considered things like whether its atmosphere would be thinner or thicker than ours, its oceans more or less salty, and whether the sea covers the entire planet.

In every case the scientists could dream up, Proxima b had at least some surface liquid water, giving it a “pretty good chance” of being habitable, Del Genio said.

“We also found that the ocean currents carried warm water from the dayside to the nightside, keeping parts of the nightside habitable even though they never see any light,” he added. “And if the ocean is very salty, almost the entire planet could be covered by liquid, but with temperatures below the usual freezing point almost everywhere.”

NASA’s planet hunter TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), meanwhile, has begun providing data on planets beyond our Solar System.

The study of exoplanets has seen remarkable discoveries in the past decade, including a series of orbs that could host alien life. But some folks still want more. Read all about outer space here.

Let us know what you like about Geek by taking our survey.</s>The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), NASA's newest planet-hunter, just hit another milestone: It has discovered its first exoplanet.

On Monday, NASA shared the space telescope's "first light" data, revealing hundreds of thousands of stars in the southern sky that it has set it sights on and confirming that, yes, things were working as they should be. That means TESS can focus its four cameras on stars, looking for slight dips in brightness which suggests a planet may have been "transiting" around the star.

It seems that data was only an appetizer though, as a preprint paper uploaded to the arXiv server on Sunday suggests TESS has already found its very first planet: a super-Earth orbiting the star Pi Mensae (π Men), nearly 60 light years away. NASA's TESS Twitter account announced the discovery on Wednesday, but said discovery still needs to be reviewed before it is validated.

If the data is validated, the new super-Earth, which was dubbed "π Men c", will go down as TESS's first discovery on its two-year mission to find Earth-like exoplanets around nearby stars. Its orbital period is just 6.3 days long.

And the new super-Earth isn't alone. Another planet known as "π Men b", about 10 times the size of Jupiter and with an orbital period of greater than 2,100 days, also calls Pi Mensae home.

But wait, there's more. Literally: More new exoplanets!

A second prepint paper, uploaded to arXiv on Wednesday, suggests that TESS may have already located an "ultra-short-period planet" around the M dwarf LHS 3844. That star is a little closer than Pi Mensae, at a touch under 49 light years away. Currently dubbed "LHS 3844 b", the planet zips around its star with an orbit taking just 11 hours. It is likely highly irradiated and thus would not have an atmosphere, but those assumptions will need to be tested with spectroscopy. Moreover, the research team cautions that it may actually be orbiting a low-luminosity secondary star.

The data will need to be validated before the exoplanet is officially added to our ever-expanding list of nearby celestial bodies. Both observations came via the TESS Alerts system, which is currently in beta, and allows TESS scientists to follow-up on planet candidates before the first TESS data release in January 2019.

What is most mind-boggling is that TESS has only just begun its mission. The space telescope launched on the back of a SpaceX Falcon in April and officially began observations in July. What wonders still await? How many exoplanets will we find?

TESS is just the start of analysis for many of these exoplanets and the data it provides allows scientists to dig a little deeper, revealing more about the planets they find using spectroscopy. If the first month is anything to go by, an influx of exoplanet data will start to filter out from the spacecraft as it continues to map the southern sky, hunting for planets.

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• NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope, called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
• TESS could discover thousands of new planets relatively close to Earth.
• The telescope began its mission on July 25, and it will spend two years scanning 85% of the night sky.
• Scientists hope TESS will find about 50 small, rocky planets that could be habitable to alien life.

NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope.

TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is helping scientists detect and study new planets in other solar systems.

The telescope launched in April on a SpaceX rocket, and on July 25, TESS slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon.

The telescope is now scanning the night sky, staring down distant solar systems, and hunting for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

NASA just released the first science image captured by Tess, though it was actually taken in early August. The image above is just a portion of the full image — the bright part on the right is the Large Magellanic Cloud, while the bright star R Doradus is on the left.

The full frame captured a much bigger swath of the southern sky. The detailed image was produced using all four of the spacecraft's wide-field cameras for 30 minutes, while the portion above shows the view captured by a single detector of one of its cameras. (That should give you a sense of how powerful the whole telescope is.)

The image below shows more of TESS' "first light" image. Notable features include the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The brightest stars in the image, Beta Gruis and R Doradus, saturated an entire column of camera detector pixels on the satellite’s second and fourth cameras.

"This first light science image shows the capabilities of TESS' cameras, and shows that the mission will realize its incredible potential in our search for another Earth." Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said in a statement.

NASA plans to have TESS monitor 85% of the sky over the next two years, focusing on a new sector every 27 days. TESS will study 13 sectors in the southern sky the first year, followed by 13 sectors in the northern sky the second year. By the end of that period, TESS is expected to have observed about 200,000 stars.

To hunt for planets, the telescope will look for changes in a star's brightness level — an indication that a planet is passing in front of the star as part of its orbit.

Scientists anticipate that data from TESS could reveal thousands of new planets that are within 200 light-years of Earth. The team working on TESS even hope to find about 50 small, rocky planets that could be habitable to alien life.

Sara Seager, the deputy science director for TESS, previously told Business Insider that she expects to find dozens of Earth-like planets in the next few years, which could double the current list of potentially habitable exoplanets.

NASA has previously hunted for exoplanets with the Kepler space telescope, and detected thousands of them in a small part of the night sky. But Kepler has nearly run out of fuel and is currently in sleep mode.

TESS will scan a much larger region of the sky than Kepler did — and one that is closer to Earth.

"We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars," Hertz said in an April press release. "TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds."</s>An exoplanet about twice the size of Earth has been found orbiting a star called Pi Mensae about 60 light years away. It’s the first world discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – a spacecraft that began surveying the galaxy just two months ago.

“This is one of the first objects we looked at,” says Chelsea Huang, a TESS scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We were immediately saying ‘hey this is too good to be true!’”

The alien world, Pi Mensae c, takes 6.27 days to complete an orbit around its parent star, Pi Mensae. That star is so bright, it’s visible to the naked-eye from a dark-sky site in the southern hemisphere. It was previously found to have a planet the mass of ten Jupiters circling it.

TESS works by watching thousands of nearby stars in the Milky Way, looking for signs of planets transiting them – miniscule dips in the stars’ brightness can give away the presence of an orbiting planet momentarily passing in front of them. Such a blip in the light from Pi Mensae was identified in the first month of observations beamed home by TESS, says Huang.

The team confirmed the presence of Pi Mensae c by examining separate studies of the light of its parent star made by ground-based observatories. This analysis revealed a tiny tell-tale wobble in the star’s motion that the researchers attribute to the gravitational pull of TESS’s newly detected world.

Based on the planet’s radius it’s likely a mini-Neptune with a gaseous hydrogen and helium atmosphere, says Hugh Osborn, an exoplanet researcher at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory in France. “Pretty much all the planets we find at that radius have this gassy layer,” he says. “So it wouldn’t look anything like Earth.”

Shortly after the first detection, NASA announced that TESS had found a second planet. This new world, called LHS 3844 b, orbits a small star 49 light years away. It is smaller than Pi Mensae c, only 1.3 times the size of Earth, but much hotter at an average temperature of about 532°C.

It is so close to its star that it orbits once every 11 minutes. The TESS team say that it may be the easiest planet to observe that is less than twice Earth’s size. That means it will be easier to check if it has an atmosphere, although it is so hot that it likely does not.

Read more: The galaxy is full of ‘water world’ exoplanets where life could evolve</s>There are millions of stars in the night sky, and there’s a good chance nearly all of them have planets orbiting them. Potentially billions of planets are out there waiting for us to discover them, and a new NASA spacecraft has just begun helping us find them. NASA’s TESS spacecraft just released its first image of our galaxy’s stars, and a new recently-released paper details how researchers have already used TESS data to find a planet around another star.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft has been in the works for years, but only launched into space in April. Since then, it’s primarily spent the past few months running tests on its systems and making sure everything checks out. It even imaged a passing comet as part of those tests back in August.

Around the same time, TESS took what is known as its ‘first light’ image, the very first image ever captured by the spacecraft’s cameras. That image contains millions of stars from a region in the southern sky, captured by all four of the spacecraft’s cameras over a 30 minute period.

Over the next year, TESS will take frequent images of the southern sky, rotating its narrow view once every month. After covering the southern sky in 13 different sectors during that first year, TESS will then switch to imaging the northern sky the next year. While staring at the same section of the sky, it will be easy for TESS’s instruments to spot if a star is growing slightly brighter or dimmer, indicative of a hidden planet blocking some of its starlight.

TESS is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets, and according to a recent paper it’s already found one. According to a new paper submitted to the journal AAS Letter, the new planet orbits a star called Pi Mensae, and is a little over twice as big as the Earth. However, despite only being twice as big it’s more than four times as heavy as Earth, meaning it likely has many more metals and other heavier elements.

It’s also much closer to its host star, and a year on this newly discovered planet lasts only about 6 Earth days. That means there’s no chance this planet can support life. But this is only the first discovered exoplanet out of the thousands that TESS will find over the next few years. Who knows what we’ll find out there.</s>The US' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a jaw-dropping new image captured by its newest planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

The image, which was snapped on August 7 over a 30 minute period, captured dozens of constellations, including Capricornus and Pictor, and both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, according to NASA's release on the photo.

TESS also captured the likes of NGC 104, a spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of stars that includes Beta Gruis and R Doradus. Both stars are so bright that they show up as vertical lines of white in images picked up by TESS' second and fourth cameras.

The image is the first TESS has provided since it officially began its scientific search for planets on July 25. It previously photographed C/2018 N1, a comet discovered by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) satellite on June 29. TESS made its way to space on April 18 after being launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission duration is expected to last some two years.</s>ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - A planet-hunting orbital telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system discovered two distant planets this week five months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, officials said on Thursday.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as TESS, made an early discovery of “super-Earth” and “hot Earth” planets in solar systems at least 49 light-years away, marking the satellite’s first discovery since its April launch. TESS is on a two-year, $337 million mission to expand astronomers’ known catalog of so-called exoplanets, worlds circling distant stars.

While the two planets are too hot to support life, TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager expects many more such discoveries.

“We will have to wait and see what else TESS discovers,” Seager told Reuters. “We do know that planets are out there, littering the night sky, just waiting to be found.”

TESS is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years and is running out of fuel.

NASA expects to pinpoint thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth” sized - no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

Those are believed the most likely to feature rocky surfaces or oceans and are thus considered the best candidates for life to evolve. Scientists have said they hope TESS will ultimately help catalog at least 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study in what has become one of astronomy’s newest fields of exploration.

MIT researchers on Wednesday announced the discovery of Pi Mensae c, a “super-earth” planet 60 light-years away orbiting its sun every 6.3 days. The discovery of LHS 3844 b, a “hot-earth” planet 49 light-years away that orbits its sun every 11 hours, was announced on Thursday.

Pi Mensae c could have a solid surface or be a waterworld as the composition of such planets is a mixed bag, Martin Spill, NASA’s program scientist for TESS, said in a phone interview.

The two newest planets, which still need to be reviewed by other researchers, offer the chance for follow-up study, officials said.

“That, of course, is TESS’ entire purpose - to find those planets around those brightest nearby stars to do this really detailed characterization,” Spill said.

With four special cameras, TESS uses a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic dips in the visible light of stars caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of them.</s>NASA's newest planet-hunter telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has now shared the first science image that it captured as part of its initial round of data collection.

Part of the data from TESS' initial science orbit includes a detailed picture of the southern sky taken with all four of the spacecraft's wide-field cameras, NASA said in a statement on 17 September.

This image captures a wealth of stars and other objects, including systems previously known to have exoplanets.

"In a sea of stars brimming with new worlds, TESS is casting a wide net and will haul in a bounty of promising planets for further study," said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division Director at NASA headquarters in Washington.

"This first light science image shows the capabilities of TESS' cameras, and shows that the mission will realise its incredible potential in our search for another Earth," Hertz said.

TESS acquired the image using all four cameras during a 30-minute period on 7 August, NASA said.

The images include parts of a dozen constellations, from Capricornus to Pictor, and both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the galaxies nearest to our own.

"This swath of the sky's southern hemisphere includes more than a dozen stars we know have transiting planets based on previous studies from ground observatories," said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge.

TESS's cameras monitor large swathes of the sky to look for transits. Transits occur when a planet passes in front of its star as viewed from the satellite's perspective, causing a regular dip in the star's brightness.

TESS builds on the legacy of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which also uses transits to find exoplanets.

Its target stars are 30 to 300 light-years away and about 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler's targets, which are 300 to 3,000 light-years away.

The spacecraft launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 18 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and used a flyby of the Moon on May 17 to head toward its science orbit.

It started collecting scientific data on July 25 after a period of extensive checks of its instruments, NASA said.
NASA discovers its first exoplanet via the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope. Pi Mensae c, a small Earth-like exoplanet, is located nearly 60 light-years away from Earth.