Astronomers Identify More Than 10000 Exoplanet Candidates in NASA TESS Data

Astronomers have identified 11554 candidate exoplanets in data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the largest number found in a single analysis. The satellite, known as TESS, was launched in 2018 and detects exoplanets by observing brief dips in starlight caused by planets passing in front of their host stars.

The reanalysis of the first year of TESS observations was conducted by Joshua Roth at Princeton University and his colleagues. By combining images from the telescope, the team was able to search for planets around fainter stars than had been examined before.

This approach revealed 10091 candidates that had not appeared in prior exoplanet searches. TESS has so far confirmed more than 750 exoplanets, with thousands of additional candidates still awaiting verification. The total number of confirmed exoplanets identified by all telescopes currently stands at more than 6000.

The new candidates extend up to 6800 light-years from Earth toward the center of the galaxy, double the previous search distance for TESS.

More than 90 percent of the newly identified candidates are hot Jupiters, which are gas giant planets that orbit very close to their stars with orbital periods of just a few days. TESS is particularly effective at detecting such worlds. A smaller fraction of the candidates are classified as Neptunes or super-Earths.

Not all candidates will prove to be planets. Roth said TESS usually has a false positive rate of 50 percent. He estimated that a maximum of 5000 of the candidates are real planets, and possibly as few as 3000.

“There have been predictions that there were thousands of planets still lurking in the TESS data. She noted that a larger dataset allows for comparisons of planetary characteristics around different types of stars. The findings come from a paper posted on arXiv with DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2604.18579. Even at the lower estimate, the new candidates would increase the number of known exoplanets by half. Additional candidates already identified in TESS data, approximately 8000, still require further examination. Predictions indicate TESS should ultimately yield between 12000 and 15000 confirmed planets. Christiansen said researchers have been anticipating such large releases of candidates from the mission.”