This northern sky mosaic contains 208 images taken by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TSS) during the second year of scientific operations completed in July 2020. The mission divided the northern sky into 13 regions, each of which was conceived for a single picture. Month by the spacecraft’s four cameras. Many notable celestial objects are visible: glowing arcs and obscuring dust clouds from the galaxy (left), visible in the direction of the galaxy edge of our home; The Andromeda Galaxy (oval, left in the center), our nearest galaxy neighbor is located 2.5 million light-years away; And the North American Nebula (lower left), part of a stellar factory complex 1,700 light-years away. The leading dark line is the gap between the detectors in TESS’s camera camera system. Credits: NASA / MIT / Tess and Ethan Cruise (USRA)
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TSS) has discovered 74 exoplanets or the world beyond our solar system. Astronomers are exploring about 1,200 additional exoplanet candidates, awaiting confirmation of a possible new world. More than 600 of these candidates are in the northern sky.
TESS detects planets by observing several stars simultaneously in large areas of the sky and looking for small changes in their brightness. When a planet passes in front of its host star from our perspective, it blocks some of the star’s light, causing it to temporarily dim. This phenomenon is called transition, and it repeats with each orbit of the planet around the star. This technology has so far proved successful in its strategy of finding planets, which account for about three quarters of the now known 4,300 exoplanets. The data collected also allows for the study of other phenomena such as stellar diversity and supernova explosions in unprecedented detail.
The northern mosaic covers less of the sky than its southern part, which was envisioned during the mission’s first year of operation. For about half the northern regions, the team decided to take the angle of the cameras further north to minimize the effect of light scattered from the Earth and the Moon. This results in significant gaps in coverage.
Northern Panorama presents a glimpse of them as TESS returns. The mission divides each celestial hemisphere into 13 sectors. TESA imaged each field for about a month using four field cameras, with a total of 16 sensors called charge-clad devices (CCDs). During its primary mission, the cameras capture the entire area of the sky every 30 minutes. This means that each CCD acquires about 30,800 complete science images. Add to the other criteria, TESS has returned more than 40 terabytes so far – the equivalent of streaming 12,000 high-definition movies.
Significantly, this number will grow rapidly over the next year. TESS has now begun its extended mission, during which it will spend one more year in southern sky imaging. The satellite will re-visit the planets found in its first year, fill in the coverage gap with new discoveries and its initial survey. Improvements in satellite data collection and processing now allow TESS to return images of the entire sector every 10 minutes and measure the brightness of thousands of stars every 20 minutes – all while continuing its previous strategy of measuring the brightness of thousands of stars every two minutes.
This detail of TESS Northern Panorama features a field in the constellation Cygnus. In the center, scattered dark nebulae Le Gentle 3, a huge cloud of interstellar dust, obscure the light of more distant stars. A leading tendril extending to the lower left points towards the bright North American nebula, the bright gas, named for its resemblance to the continent. Credit: NASA / MIT / Tess and Ethan Cruz (USRA)
“These changes promise to make TSS’s expanded mission more fruitful,” said Paddy Boyd, a project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center mission in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Creating high-precision measurements of stellar luminosity at these frequencies makes TSS an exceptionally new tool for studying light and pulsating stars and other transient phenomena, as well as for discovering the science of transitions in exoplanets.”
TES presents a panorama of the southern sky
Testimonial: NASA’s TESA Creates a Cosmic Vista of the Northern Hemisphere (2020, 5 October October) https://phys.org/news/2020-10-nasa-tess-cosmic-vista-n Retrieved 5 October October 2020 from Northern.html
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