TESS First Discoveries: Planets and So Much More!

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NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an exciting mission anticipated to deliver a new catalog of extra-solar planets, many of them likely a few times the size of the Earth. Early in this stage of the mission it delivers! From a planet about 2x the size of Earth but in other ways very different (Pi Mensae c) to a rocky planet about 1.3 times Earth’s size, LHS 3884b, which is very hot being close to its star. There are more planet discoveries on the books already and the list is growing. TESS, because it can observe short changes in brightness of objects, also has measured early time light curves of least 20 supernovae!
TESS will also be able to find numerous other objects such as flaring stars, comets, binaries, and others.
To hear all about the TESS mission and discoveries, join Tony Darnell and Carol Christian during Afternoon Astronomy Coffee on Thursday, 28 February 2019 at 3:00 pm Eastern Time (20:00 UTC) as they discuss all these topics with investigators, Chelsea Huang, Michael Fausnaugh and Diana Dragomir (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
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