NASA’s TESS mission has identified thousands of possible alien worlds.
Newsweek reported on some of the strangest and most exciting exoplanet candidates detected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
So far, TESS has discovered more than 5,000 alien worlds outside of our own solar system.
In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched the TESS mission and began collecting information about these distant worlds.
“At this time last year, TESS had found just over 2,400 TOIs (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Object of Interest). Today, TESS has reached more than double that number, a great testament to the mission and all the teams looking for data on new planets,” said Michell Kunimoto, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.
Newsweek reports that many of the exoplanets already identified are notable for their general rarity or their resemblance to Earth.
TOI-2109b orbits its parent star, about 855 million light-years from Earth, in just 16 hours.
Daytime temperatures in TOI-2109b reach a scorching 3315 ºC.
Another world, GJ-367b, one of the smallest planets detected, has a super fast orbit of only eight hours and daytime temperatures of up to 1482 ºC.
Other exoplanets have stood out for their similarities to Earth.
In January 2020, NASA announced that it had found the first Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of its star.
TOI-700d is reportedly a rocky world only slightly larger than Earth, and situated about 100 light-years away.
