NASA's TESS has discovered 2,200 exoplanets

NASA's TESS extraterrestrial hunter has exceeded all expectations and identified more than 2,200 potential planets since launching its mission in 2018. Initially, its goal was to locate just 1,600 planets. Hundreds of them are smaller and more rocky, like Earth, but not necessarily habitable.

This "explosion" in the discovery of exoplanets will allow the successors of TESS to explore the atmospheres of these planets in search of water, oxygen and other molecules that may promote growth or host life. The full list of candidate planets has been published on Arxiv.org.

Some of the discoveries are particularly unusual. The rocky planet TOI-700 d is just 100 light-years away. LHS 3844 b is a hot super-Earth with an 11-hour orbit around its star. The TOI 1690 b survived the expansion of a red giant that swallowed the planets of its orbit, and the TOI 849 b is a gas giant that either lost its atmosphere or never had one.

TESS is on a wide orbit between Earth and Moon. His mission has now expanded to fill gaps in astronomical maps, the night sky seen by telescopes in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

The interesting thing is to see the map of TESS exoplanets as a kind of to-do list - with 2,000 things on it. Now the role of the community is to unite the dots. It's amazing because the field is so new, there is still a lot of room for discovery, these "Aha!" moments. - Natalia Guerrero, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.