NASAのインスタグラム(nasagoddard) - 9月18日 03時06分

Check out the first science image using all four cameras released by our newest planet-hunting satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS! Swipe through to see the first full swath of sky that TESS imaged in a search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

This “first light” image of TESS’s science mission captured a bounty of stars and other objects, including systems previously known to have exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system. These images were taken over 30 minutes on Tuesday, Aug. 7. They cover a band of the southern sky that captures parts of a southern dozen constellations, from Pictor (the Painter’s Easel) in the first image Capricornus (the Sea Goat) in the last image. However, it might be hard to find familiar constellations among all these stars!

In the first and second images, you’ll find the Milky Way’s closest neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The small bright dot to the right the Small Magellanic Cloud is a globular cluster — a spherical collection of tens of thousands of stars — called NGC 104, also known as 47 Tucanae because of its location in the constellation Tucana (the Toucan). In the first and third images, there are also two stars so bright to TESS’s cameras that they saturate an entire column of pixels on the cameras' digital sensors, resulting in long horizontal lines.

Led out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TESS is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets. It will scan nearly the entire sky over two years to monitor 200,000 of the nearest and brightest stars in search of transits – periodic dips in a star’s brightness caused by planets passing in front of their stars.

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