While most people spend their days discovering expired yogurt in the office fridge, scientists at NASA have been discovering entire worlds. In the latest count from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, affectionately known as TESS, NASA confirmed the discovery of more than 5,000 potential exoplanets. The satellite, which has been scanning the skies since its launch in 2018, is apparently very good at its job, perhaps because it never insists on playing its own Spotify playlist over everyone else’s.
NASA boasts that over 360 of these 5,000 candidates have already made the jump from “possible alien vacation spot” to officially confirmed planet, a rate that certainly makes one reconsider the supposed challenge of real estate hunting in our own solar system. These exoplanets come in all shapes, sizes and probable levels of weirdness, ranging from Earth-sized rocky bodies to things called hot Jupiters, which sound like coffee orders but are in fact gas giants orbiting perilously close to their host stars where sunscreen is not optional, just irrelevant.
The process is relatively straightforward, assuming you have a multi-million-dollar space telescope and a PhD. TESS identifies exoplanets by spotting the brief dimming of a star’s light as a planet ambles past it in the cosmic equivalent of photobombing an Instagram sunset. These tiny blips, known as transits, are then painstakingly reviewed by a planet-hungry army of astronomers, graduate students and people who presumably no longer get invited to parties.
This week NASA released a celebratory video on social media to mark the milestone, which is the modern equivalent of announcing scientific discovery via interpretive TikTok. The triumph also confirms TESS as a strong successor to the Kepler Space Telescope, which retired in 2018 after discovering thousands of exoplanets itself before retiring to a comfortable existence somewhere in the cloud storage of history.
Most of these exoplanets reside far beyond our interstellar commute range, but researchers are especially enthusiastic about those located in the habitable zones of their stars, a technical term that translates loosely to places where you might not immediately die upon arrival.
While scientists won’t be sending moving vans to these planets anytime soon, their discovery opens the door to further studies on planetary atmospheres, potential signs of life and how many of these places might come with their own tax codes.
“TESS is producing a torrent of high-quality observations providing insights into the wide diversity of planets in our galaxy,” said Natalia Guerrero, TESS Objects of Interest project leader, underlining that what may seem like a fun internship actually requires constant celestial vigilance.
With cosmic real estate expanding at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before someone starts selling NFTs of exoplanets, probably with a very sincere YouTube video.
Because why stop at Earth when the galaxy is full of fixer uppers with great views and only minimal existential dread.