The new NASA Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to search for inhabited exoplanets, but thousands of sun-like and smaller stars fall in the field of view of this device – so which of these stars can have planets like the Earth in their systems?
The TESS will observe 400,000 stars scattered across the sky, recording the passage of the planet in front of the parent star, or transit. The transit method is one of the main methods for detecting exoplanets.
In their new scientific work, a team of astronomers led by Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy and director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, USA, identified the most promising goals for scientific research in the catalog called TESS Habitable Zone Star Catalog.
This new catalog was based on a catalog originally developed at Vanderbilde University, USA, and containing hundreds of millions of stars. Using data from several different sources, including the KELT telescope at Vanderbilde University and the new method of analyzing star flicker, developed at the same university, scientists since 2012 have gradually reduced this set from 470 million stars observed using the TESS satellite , up to 250000 stars, in the systems of which the habitable planet is most likely to be detected.
The new catalog contains 1823 stars for which the TESS satellite is sensitive enough to detect Earth-like planets just slightly larger than Earth, which receive about as much heat from the parent star as the Earth receives from the sun. In the case of 408 stars, the TESS satellite is able to notice a planet the size of the Earth with the same level of irradiation by the light of a star, which does not double as in the previous case, but only a single transit.
The stars selected to compile this catalog are bright, cold dwarfs with temperatures ranging from 2700 to 6000 Kelvin. The stars in this catalog are selected by the criterion of brightness; the nearest of them are located at a distance of about 4 light years from Earth.
NASA Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey Satellite
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