Quote from: Star One on 01/09/2019 06:50 amNASA Exoplanet Hunter Racks Up Bizarre Worlds and Exploding StarsOther highlights from that article:QuoteTESS works better than team members had dared to dream, says George Ricker, a physicist at MIT and the mission’s principal investigator. Its four cameras can see objects 20% fainter, and focus more sharply, than originally expected. [...]His team is now writing a proposal to NASA asking that TESS’s mission be extended past its initial two years. That deadline for the proposal was 1 February—but the ongoing partial US government shutdown means Ricker isn’t sure how that timing could change.
NASA Exoplanet Hunter Racks Up Bizarre Worlds and Exploding Stars
TESS works better than team members had dared to dream, says George Ricker, a physicist at MIT and the mission’s principal investigator. Its four cameras can see objects 20% fainter, and focus more sharply, than originally expected. [...]His team is now writing a proposal to NASA asking that TESS’s mission be extended past its initial two years. That deadline for the proposal was 1 February—but the ongoing partial US government shutdown means Ricker isn’t sure how that timing could change.
It moves on from an observation after 27 days, can this period be altered so that it stares at a patch of sky for longer periods?
The first confirmed discovery is a world called Pi Mensae c about twice Earth’s size. Every six days, the new planet orbits the star Pi Mensae, located about 60 light-years away and visible to the unaided eye in the southern constellation Mensa. The bright star Pi Mensae is similar to the Sun in mass and size.
Next is LHS 3884b, a rocky planet about 1.3 times Earth’s size located about 49 light-years away in the constellation Indus, making it among the closest transiting exoplanets known. The star is a cool M-type dwarf star about one-fifth the size of our Sun. Completing an orbit every 11 hours, the planet lies so close to its star that some of its rocky surface on the daytime side may form pools of molten lava.
The confirmed planet, HD 21749b, is about three times Earth’s size and 23 times its mass, orbits every 36 days, and has a surface temperature around 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degrees Celsius). “This planet has a greater density than Neptune, but it isn’t rocky. It could be a water planet or have some other type of substantial atmosphere,” explained Diana Dragomir, a Hubble Fellow at MKI and lead author of a paper describing the find. It is the longest-period transiting planet within 100 light-years of the solar system, and it has the coolest surface temperature of a transiting exoplanet around a star brighter than 10th magnitude, or about 25 times fainter than the limit of unaided human vision.
A team of astronomers from Cornell, Lehigh University and Vanderbilt University has identified the most promising targets for this search in the new “TESS Habitable Zone Star Catalog,” published March 26 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Lead author Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute, is a member of the TESS science team. The catalog identifies 1,822 stars for which TESS is sensitive enough to spot Earth-like planets just a bit larger than Earth that receive radiation from their star equivalent to what Earth receives from our sun. For 408 stars, TESS can glimpse a planet just as small as Earth, with similar irradiation, in one transit alone.
Three extrasolar comets have been discovered around the star Beta Pictoris, 63 light years away, by an international team including a University of Warwick researcher.Analysis of data from the current NASA mission TESS has revealed the objects for the first time thanks to Sebastian Zieba and Konstanze Zwintz from the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, together with colleagues from Leiden University (Netherlands) and the University of Warwick (UK).
Quote from: deruch on 09/07/2018 10:02 pmDr. Jeff Volosin - TESS - 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention@17:20 'You can see the rise of a supernova and you can see it tail off. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but we're publishing in the next couple of weeks something around that' - paraphrased.Just after that he refers again to 'usually you don't have the benefit of a camera which takes data every two seconds' - which is odd for a comment about supernova if there is no triggering on high brightness events, because if there is no fast trigger, then there is no point at all, because by the time the data is downlinked, the next opportunity to observe that spot will often be a couple of years hence, and the only frames stored would be at the low 'full frame' decimated rate.Quote from: speedevil on 09/03/2018 11:30 pmIf you have ten prior frames stored, and have enough spare CPU to threshold every few frames to see if anything has popped up five sigma and add it to a list of areas to store postage stamps around that area at 0.5s until it quiets down.Will be interesting to see details in the paper referred to.
Dr. Jeff Volosin - TESS - 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention
If you have ten prior frames stored, and have enough spare CPU to threshold every few frames to see if anything has popped up five sigma and add it to a list of areas to store postage stamps around that area at 0.5s until it quiets down.
I will be meeting with the TESS group next week, if anyone has a particularly burning question for them...I have an agenda of my own, of course, so don't expect me to ask more than a few quick questions...
I will be meeting with the TESS group next week, if anyone has a particularly burning question for them...
How do we better resolve inner system rocky worlds? Resolve includes atmospheric composition.
