The TESS space telescope has spotted its first exoplanet
Pi Men c’s size and mass suggest it may have lots of water
The next exoplanet hunt is officially on. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in April (SN: 5/12/18, p. 7), has taken its first wide-sky science image and has confirmed its first exoplanet.
The “first light” image (the moniker for a new telescope’s first useful image), taken August 7 with all four of the telescope’s cameras and released September 17, shows a field of stars and two of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. A few of the stars are so bright they saturated the telescope’s light detector, creating streaks of light across the whole image.