TESS is NASA’s new exoplanet hunter to be launched in some hours. I am writing this on April 15th 2018. WWIII has not begun as I am writing this. I feel lucky. I hope PUTIN, TRUMP, MAY and MACRON realize that all of them are part of the same species and stop this escalation. I almost feel a fool writing about Astrophysics and Cosmology when the spaceship from where I am writing, planet Earth actually, may be put in danger by my own species., the supposedly intelligent one.
TESS stands for TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE.
The TESS satellite telescope will search for exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) using the TRANSIT METHOD.
You look at a distant star carefully … during a period of time. Then you look at the variation of its brightness. If a planet of this star in transiting between the star and us the brightness would diminish a bit and this would happen in a periodic time.
If someone was looking at our star, the SUN, from far far away, the may see that the light of the SUN diminishes a bit from time to time as a planet transits. This is not straightforward I imagine because although a planet is orbiting a star you have to be looking in the plane of the orbit of the planet! And there can be more than one planet. And keep in mind that, for example, in the case of the Earth, somebody far far away should be looking for a period of a year to see the transit again!
So one has to look at a lot of stars to find some transiting planet and for a long time.
I have read that TESS will tell possible candidates from its data and then other telescopes, like HUBBLE, will look into the stars with possible exoplanets. So it is not TESS just doing the job.
An interesting thing too about TESS is its location in Space related to the Moon …
SCHRODINGER THE CAT 