Welcome to our new Planet Hunters TESS project!
TESS is NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will spend the next two years looking for distant alien worlds. The first batch of data has only just been released by NASA and we are ready to find planets around other stars in our Galaxy. Will you join the search?
We are proudly following in the footsteps of the tremendously successful Planet Hunters project. You may have heard of this project, or even contributed to some of its amazing discoveries. Over the course of eight years they found over two-thousand planet candidates, including planetary systems that we didn’t even think possible!
The original Planet Hunters project used data from the Kepler mission, which came to an end earlier this year. But with the end of Kepler comes the beginning of TESS, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and with that an exciting new project: Planet Hunters TESS. Throughout the mission, TESS will point its four cameras at two-hundred-thousand bright nearby stars, four-hundred times more than Kepler observed throughout its lifetime. These TESS target stars will be closer and brighter than the Kepler targets, which will allow us to more easily observe planet candidates using Earth-based telescopes. The discovery of many more worlds will further our knowledge of planet formation and evolution, and will allow us to better understand the galaxy in which we live.
But we can’t find them alone! We’ll be hunting for planets by monitoring the light given off by a star. When an planet passes, or “transits”, in front of its host star, the star momentarily dims and we see a dip in the light. This method of detecting planets has already proven to be extremely effective! Even though we can train machines to find some planets, studies have shown that human brains are excellent at detecting patterns and finding planets that automated routines miss. Together we can find the most complex, unusual and exciting planetary systems.
We’re the new Planet Hunters TESS core science team, and we’re very excited to have you join our hunt for distant worlds at www.planethunters.org.
We hope you enjoy the project!
Nora & the Planet Hunters TESS team
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