NASA has discovered a new planet and a whole host of stars that might be able to support life.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite began last April and has already made some exciting discoveries, according to a report by CNN.
Scientists working with TESS say they have discovered a new planet about the size of Saturn. It rotates around its host star at a close distance, creating very high temperatures on the surface.
The discovery is among the first for TESS, which replaced the Kepler space telescope in the search for new planets.
This week, a team of astronomers also announced they identified a catalog of stars, more than 1,800 of which might be prospects for supporting life. The stars have planets that are slightly larger than Earth and might exist in the habitable zone of the stars.
Within that group there is a subset of 408 stars that might support planets about the size of Earth and receive comparable levels of radiation.
“I have 408 new favorite stars,” member of the TESS science team Lisa Kaltenegger said. “It is amazing that I don’t have to pick just one; I now get to search hundreds of stars.”
“We don’t know how many planets TESS will find around the hundreds of stars in our catalog or whether they will be habitable. But the odds are in our favor,” she added.
TESS is exploring an area 400 times larger than what its predecessor Kepler observed. NASA hopes the exoplanets will help scientists determine new targets for future missions.
