NASA’s planet hunter ‘Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite’ (TESS) Mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star’s habitable zone.
- The planet is TOI 700 d, and it was discovered using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and have modeled the planet’s potential environments to help inform future observations.
- TESS discovered three planets in orbit, named TOI 700 b, c and d. Only “d” is in the so-called habitable zone.
- TESS monitors large swaths of the sky, called sectors, for 27 days at a time. This long stare allows the satellite to track changes in stellar brightness caused by an orbiting planet crossing in front of its star from our perspective, an event called a transit.
About TOI 700 Star system
- TOI 700 is a small, cool M dwarf star located just over 100 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. It’s roughly 40% of the Sun’s mass and size and about half its surface temperature. The star appears in 11 of the 13 sectors TESS observed during the mission’s first year, and scientists caught multiple transits by its three planets.
Habitable Zone
- It is the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on the surface.
- TOI 700 d is one of only a few Earth-size planets discovered in a star’s habitable zone so far. Others include several planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system and other worlds discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
About TESS
- TESS was launched on April 18, 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
- The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life.
- The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.
- TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets.
