On April 16, 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will lift off from Cape Canaveral. Now a new planet hunter will join the search. And we’ve seen signs of planets being born, infant worlds scoring dark rings in the dust around their stars. We’ve discovered a free-floating planet not bound to any star. In recent years, astronomers have taken the first direct images of exoplanets, blurry pixels of alien landscapes. Kepler found systems of planets, groups of worlds swirling around their star, lonely planets encased in ice, other worlds scorched by fire, newborn planets shrouded in dust, waterworlds, and planets swept by global storms, planets dancing in orbit with two stars, or even three, and even planets from other galaxies that were swallowed up by the Milky Way.
It looked for small dips in starlight, when a planet crosses in front of its star. It found thousands of exoplanets by staring at a small patch of the Milky Way.
The Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009. As an orbiting planet tugs on its star, the starlight we see shifts from blue to red and back again. The wobble method of planet hunting relies on sensitive spectroscopes. In 1995, astronomers discovered that a star in the constellation Pegasus was wobbling back and forth, tugged by the gravity of an unseen planet, an exoplanet, a hot and hellish world unfit for life as we know it. Only three decades ago we didn’t know if there were planets beyond our own solar system.
Our Milky Way galaxy is strewn with billions of planets, alien worlds still unseen by human eyes - at least for now. Transcript From 2018: How NASA’s TESS Spacecraft Will Hunt Exoplanets NASA’s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds.
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