NASA launched its latest planet-hunting telescope — Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess — on Wednesday.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, carrying Tess, whose launch was delayed for two days by a technical glitch in the rocket's guidance-control system.
The washing machine-sized telescope will scan almost the entire sky for two years in the search for more worlds circling stars beyond our solar system that could harbor life.
Read more: NASA's space telescope TESS on a search for exoplanets
NASA hopes Tess's four cameras might reveal thousands of planets beyond our solar system, several of them Earth-sized planets.
"The sky will become more beautiful, will become more awesome" knowing there are planets orbiting the stars we see twinkling at night, said NASA's top science administrator, Thomas Zurbuchen.
Not too hot, not too cold
Tess will mainly scout for planets in the so-called Goldilocks or habitable zone of a star — an orbit where temperatures are neither too cold nor too hot, but just right for the existence of water.
NASA's bigger, more powerful James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in another few years, will then study the most promising candidates to find out whether they could support life.
"Tess will tell us where to look at and when to look," said the mission's chief scientist, George Ricker of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Read more: Aliens calling? Scientists detect 'peculiar' signals from nearby star
NASA estimates Tess to reveal thousands of exoplanets
Kepler's successor
Tess is the successor to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which is running out of fuel after discovering thousands of exoplanets over the past nine years.
Tess's range of observation is 400 times larger than that of Kepler, and unlike its predecessor, Tess will not always be looking at the same section of the sky. It will divide the heavens into 26 sectors. The craft will monitor each of those sectors for 27 days.
While Kepler has focused on stars thousands of light-years away, Tess will concentrate on neighboring stars, dozens or hundreds of light-years away.
"One of the many amazing things that Kepler told us is that planets are everywhere and there are all kinds of planets out there," said Patricia "Padi" Boyd, director of the Tess guest investigator program at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center.
"So Tess takes the next step. If planets are everywhere, then it is time for us to find the planets that are closest to us orbiting bright nearby stars, because these will be the touchstone system."
ap/ (AP, AFP, Reuters)
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
Another planet Earth?
Exoplanet Kepler-186f is located 500 light years away from us, orbiting red dwarf Kepler-186. That small sun has only about 4 percent of the energy of our sun. Kepler-186f orbits that sun at a perfectly calibrated distance: water would neither freeze nor evoporate on the planet, which is a precondition for life. But the question of whether there is water on Kepler-186f at all remains unanswered.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
What does it look like?
There are no detailed pictures of exoplanets - just artistic representations like this one of Kepler-186f. But not even a drawing exists of the most recently discovered exoplanet, Kepler-438b. He orbits a sun-like star about 470 light years away from Earth and is just slightly larger than our planet. NASA published the discovery on January 6th.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
Spaceship Kepler: on the hunt for planets
Spaceship Kepler has been searching for Earth-like planets since 2009. They must be located in the habitable zones of suns or sun-like stars with temperatures that could allow for life, at least theoretically. They must also consist of rock or metal compounds and have a solid surface - in contrast to gas-giants.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
Ocean-giants?
This artistic drawing of Kepler-62e shows a planet covered by ocean. Scientists agree that Earth-like exoplanets most likely have large oceans. The only thing known for sure: Kepler-62e is located in the constellation of Lyra, 1,200 light years away from us. And his mother star Kepler-62 has yet another earth-like planet...
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
The Kepler-62 brothers
Kepler-62f's diameter is 1.4 times the size of Earth's diameter. The Earth-like planet is located a bit further out in the solar-system than his larger brother Kepler-62e, which is 1.61 times as bis as Earth. Both may be suited for life. Researchers believe that the existence of rocks and water is plausible.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
Orbiting two suns
Even though Kepler-16b is located at the edge of an inhabitable zone, there is most likely no life on it. This is a pity, because every morning and every evening one would be able to observe two sunrises and sunsets from there. The planet orbits two suns. Too bad Kepler-16b is most likely a Gas-planet, composed of rock and ice - not good for breathing fresh air.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
The Hubble Space Telescope offers many perspectives
The Pillars of Creation are located in the Eagle Nebula about 7,000 light years away. The joint ESA and NASA Hubble Space Telescope took new pictures of the formation. This picture is taken through an infrared light spectrum. Inside the Pillars there are numerous bright stars and young stars - including entire solar systems.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
Lights on!
The same picture through visible light: more fog, but also more color. Dust and gas in the pillars are pierced by radiation originating from young stars. These new Hubble Telescope pictures enable researchers to monitor changes in the formation over a longer period of time.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
A star is born
NGC 4102 is a LINER-Galaxy : a Low-Ionization Nuclear Emision-line Region. This means it's emitting ionized radiation, like roughly one third of all galaxies. In its center, there is a sun-burst region, where young stars seem to be born. It has a diameter of about 1,000 light years. Scientists don't understand the exact processes in the center yet.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
A Messier cluster
This cluster of stars, located in the northern part of the Hercules formation, is called Messier 92. In dark nights with clear skies, we can see it from Earth with bare eyes. The cloud includes roughly 330,000 stars, most of which consist of hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements like metalls seem to be very rare there.
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Earth-like planets and other celestial discoveries
The best view of Andromeda
The original of this photo of the Andromeda Galaxy is 1.5 billion pixels in size - the most detailed picture ever taken of that galaxy. It includes 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters. To watch it in its entire beauty, one would need 600 HD-TV-screens. The ends of the picture are 40,000 light years apart.
Author: Fabian Schmidt
