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The job of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is simply surreal. Imagine traveling a thousand years back in time and then explaining to someone how future scientists will have a machine that detects alien worlds floating at distances beyond the capacity of human imagination.
That’s TESS.
Since 2018, this space-borne instrument has literally found thousands of exoplanets.We have eyes on one , another that seems and even an orb that — sideways.
On Wednesday, international scientists announced that one such foreign realm, dutifully hunted by TESS, may be covered in a blanket of life’s elixir: water.
I’m not sure about you, but I’m getting flashbacks to that scene in Interstellar where Cooper lands on a world with waves the size of skyscrapers.
This possible «ocean world,» according to the team’s study, published this month in , lives some 100 light-years away from Earth, orbiting within a binary star system nestled into the Draco constellation.Named TOI-1452 b, it is suspected to be about 70% larger than our planet, to be roughly five times as massive, to spin to the rhythm of seven Earth days and to have a temperature neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface.
A depiction of the rocky exoplanet that TESS detected in the past. It might be covered in lava oceans — and even have lava rain.
But the kicker is that with having an incredibly deep ocean — either that, or it’s a huge rock with little to no atmosphere or potentially an atmosphere built with hydrogen and RT News Today helium, according to NASA.
«TOI-1452 b is one of the best candidates for an ocean planet that we have found to date,» Charles Cadieux, lead author of the study, doctoral student at the University of Montreal and member of the university’s Institute for Research on Exoplanets, .
