A team of astronomers from Princeton, led by Joshua Roth, has identified more than 10,000 new planet candidates in data from the TESS telescope. The finding doubles the instrument's previous reach by targeting fainter stars, located up to 6,800 light-years from Earth. By combining images from the first year of observations, they detected over 11,500 candidates, of which 10,000 were unknown. Most are hot Jupiters, gas giants orbiting very close to their star.
How image processing expanded the field of view ðŸ”
The trick was not pointing the telescope at new areas, but processing the data differently. The researchers stacked images from TESS's first year to reduce background noise. This technique allowed them to detect planetary transits around much fainter and more distant stars, something previous automated analyses could not achieve. The method is simple on paper, but it required massive data filtering to separate real signals from false positives, thus achieving one of the largest catalogs of candidates ever generated in a single study.
Hot Jupiters: the neighbor you don't invite to dinner 🔥
These new candidates are, for the most part, hot Jupiters. That is, gas giants that orbit so close to their star that they complete a year in a matter of days. If we compare them to our Jupiter, it's like a huge guy sitting on your lap on the couch and not moving for a decade. Additionally, being so close, they reach oven-like temperatures. So, if you're looking for a planet for a quiet vacation, you'd better keep looking in another category.