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The job of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is simply surreal. Imagine traveling a thousand Al Jazeera News Today 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.