Its mission is to find planets around brighter, closer stars, again by searching for shadows: the incredibly tiny subtraction of light from a star when a planet crosses in front of it.ĭuring its 4-year prime mission, Kepler was a statistical transit survey designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets around other stars. TESS is conducting a nearly all-sky survey in sequential segments, first the dome of stars that would be seen from the Southern Hemisphere, then the Northern. But while Kepler in a sense drilled core-samples into the heavens – taking deep, penetrating looks into small patches – TESS's star pictures are painted in broad strokes. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) picked up where Kepler and K2 left off, again conducting a grand survey of the sky. With its special power to see infrared light, Spitzer revealed a whole side of the universe that had been hidden from our view. This is the animated storybook tale of the Spitzer spacecraft and its exploits as part of the space telescope superteam known as NASA’s Great Observatories, which also includes Hubble, Chandra and Compton. Now we count these confirmed distant worlds – exoplanets – in the thousands, many of them about the size of Earth and orbiting in their stars’ "habitable zones." The next generation of space telescopes will open new windows in the search for life as we peer into the atmospheres of these planets, and taste their skies. It also extended our reach in the search for planets around other stars. Lifting our telescopes above the veil of Earth's atmosphere revealed a dazzling universe across the light spectrum. Still, Earth’s thick atmosphere and its rippling interference kept even the best ground-based telescopes from seeing more clearly. The technology got better and the planet count ran into the hundreds. Ground-based observatories took the reins, providing the historic first burst of exoplanet discovery. Their extreme nature, however, also made them easier to find with the early planet-hunting technology of the 1980s and ’90s. Another, a scorching gas giant with about half the heft of our own planet Jupiter, hugged its star so tightly that a year, once around the star, took only four days. Some orbited a spinning stellar corpse – the core of an exploded star – called a pulsar, and were regularly raked by pulses of radiation. The very first planets detected around other stars were wild, extreme worlds.
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