The recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is providing us with a huge amount of data that lets us look for planets outside of our own Solar System. Over the next two years TESS will be busy surveying two-hundred-thousand bright nearby stars, measuring and recording their brightness every two minutes. With your help, we hope to uncover lots of interesting planetary systems, allowing us to explore the formation and evolution of these worlds. Our findings may even bring us one step closer to answering the question that we all seek to answer: Are we alone in the Universe?

Exoplanets

Billions of planets orbit the stars of our Galaxy beyond the Sun; these planets are called “exoplanets”. When an exoplanet’s orbit is lined up so that it passes between its star and the Earth, temporarily blocking the light of its star from our view, we call it a “transiting exoplanet”. Surveys to find transiting exoplanets have taught us that worlds a few times the size of Earth are common, but left us with many unanswered questions. Where are the closest Earth-size planets? Do they harbor alien life?

Launched in 2018, NASA’s TESS mission has already discovered thousands of potential exoplanets transiting nearby stars–including planets as small as the Earth. Data from this mission should help us find the closest Earth-size planets, ones that are close enough for us to characterize in depth and study their atmospheres. A few dozen TESS planet candidates have already been confirmed as real planets.