Annie Wersching, an actor best known for her roles in “24” and “Bosch” and for originating the role of Tess in the 2013 video game “The Last of Us,” has died following a two-year battle with cancer. She was 45.
Wersching’s death was confirmed through a GoFundMe campaign, shared to draw financial support for the actor’s family. The campaign has been shared by Alexi Hawley, showrunner of “The Rookie,” Julie Plec, the showrunner of “The Vampire Diaries,” as well as “The Last of Us” creative director Neil Druckmann.
Plec tweeted, “I became a fan from ‘24’ and was lucky to be able to have Annie play mama to two of the hottest vamps in town… RIP Annie, you wonderful soul.”
“We just lost a beautiful artist and human being. My heart is shattered,” Druckmann wrote.
Just found out my dear friend, Annie Wersching, passed away. We just lost a beautiful artist and human being. My heart is shattered. Thoughts are with her loved ones.
There’s a go fund me set up for her family: https://t.co/dhvk6uOvZV
— Neil Druckmann (@Neil_Druckmann) January 29, 2023
Born in St. Louis, Mo., Wersching’s first screen credit came at 24 years old, appearing in a 2002 episode of “Star Trek: Enterprise.” Wersching would go on to appear in a variety of series — including “Frasier,” “Supernatural” and “Charmed” — before landing recurring roles as Amelia Joffe in “General Hospital” and Renee Walker in “24.” Wersching would later join “Timeless,” “The Vampire Diaries” and “Extant” as recurring characters. Wersching also appear in “Runaways” and “The Rookie.”
After being diagnosed with cancer in 2020, Wersching continued acting throughout the following two years.
Wersching’s GoFundMe notes how much the actor adored her family. “Annie lived for her family. She loved her work and cherished her friends, but Steve and the boys were her absolute everything. It’s so Steve can have time to grieve without the pressure of needing to work. So he can be daddy to Freddie (12), Ozzie (9) and Archie (4) as they navigate the future without their mom, without sweet Annie.”
Wersching is survived by her husband, Stephen, and three sons, Eddie, Ozzie and Archie, aged 12, 9 and 4.
After only two weeks, it should be pretty clear that HBO’s The Last of Us is catching on with audiences. From its spot-on adaptation of elements of the video game, to its dark extensions of that lore, to the terrifying reality of its world, fans and non-fans of the game alike seem to be eating it up. And, in the latest episode, there seemed to be less eating and more… kissing, which some may have found curious.
As discussed in our extended recap, episode two of The Last of Us ended with Tess (Anna Torv) sacrificing herself to save Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). She kind of had to, as she’s been bitten and is certain to turn into a mindless killer soon enough. But as the infected storm her location, and one of them notices her, instead of running at her in a fit of rage, he approaches slowly and gives her an open-mouth zombie kiss, with his living, squirming tendrils moving into her mouth.
It’s a moment that’s curious for a few reasons. One, it’s not in the game, so a decision was made to specifically do this. Two, we’re used to infected being incredibly violent with their victims, and this one is quite the opposite. And three, if Tess was already infected, was there any real point to it?
That third point can’t really be answered (maybe the kiss sped up the transformation or was just cool-looking), but the first two can and, in a new interview, co-showrunner Neil Druckmann talks about it. “These things don’t have to get violent unless you’re fighting them from spreading [the infection] further,” Druckmann said to Entertainment Weekly. “That is realized in this beautiful, yet horrific way with Anna.”
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So, because she’s made peace with becoming a zombie, she’s kind of brought into the mix in a non-violent way. Sure, we can buy that. But what about the tendrils themselves, which are also a new addition?
“Craig [Mazin] smartly said, ‘What can we do to separate our infected even further from zombies?’ It’s more than just a bite. There’s something else going on,” Druckmann added. “I wish we had that aha moment immediately, but we brainstormed so many different things that they could be doing. Some of them were pretty outlandish.”
And, if you thought this act of violence/romance was something, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Check out the moment in the latest episode of The Last of Us.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
You know that extreme paranoia you have about dropping your favorite device in the toilet? Withings wants you to forget all that for its latest health-tracking device, the U-Scan, which is not only specifically designed to be used in a toilet bowl, but to be urinated on as well. Stick with us; it’s not as gross as it sounds.
There’s only so much health information that can be collected from strapping a smartwatch to your wrist, clipping a pulse oximeter to your finger, or wrapping an inflatable blood pressure cuff around your upper arm. That’s why doctors will often order blood samples to be taken or request that patients pee in a cup for detailed urine analysis at a lab before making a diagnosis.
Urine tests that can be performed at home aren’t a new idea, but the info they provide is often limited. Pharmacies sell strips that can be used to test for urinary tract infections, while urine tests remain the cheapest and easiest way to confirm a pregnancy without a trip to the doctor. With the U-Scan, Withings is expanding the health information that can be gleaned from urine without sending it off to a lab, while also making the collection process completely hands-off.
Image: Withings
The hardware is reminiscent of Google’s Chromecast dongle, but instead of plugging into a TV’s HDMI port, you hang it in the front of a toilet bowl, where you then deliberately urinate on it. The U-Scan’s smooth, pebble-shaped design funnels urine along its surface down into a collection inlet at the bottom, where a thermal sensor detects the presence of the fluid and activates a pump, which draws the sample inside and through a “microfluidic circuit.” While a user is urinating, a “low-energy radar sensor embedded into the device” can also recognize and distinguish between several users by detecting their “unique urine stream signature” through a feature Withings calls Stream ID.
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Inside the U-Scan is a replaceable cartridge, good for about three months, filled with dozens of test pods into which urine is injected. Chemical reactions then occur when one or several biomarkers are detected, producing specific colors that are analyzed by an optical sensor. After the test is complete, the remaining fluids are pumped out of the U-Scan and back into the toilet. The device itself is cleaned during every flush, although you still might want to reach for a pair of gloves when swapping cartridges or giving it a charge, which you’ll need to do every three months.
The results of the U-Scan’s tests are shared over wifi to Withings’ private servers and made available through the company’s accompanying mobile apps, which allows the results and each user’s personal health data to be tracked over time. There’s no timeline for when U-Scan will be available in the United States—Withings is still developing it for the US market and it will require FDA clearance first—but the starter kit will go on sale in Europe next year for €499.95 (about US $530) and will include one of two different three-month cartridges, with the option to buy more through a subscription plan or standalone.
Image: Withings
The U-Scan Nutri Balance cartridge and app will provide information on a user’s pH, vitamin C, carb balance, and ketone levels to help “monitor their metabolic intake to optimize their daily hydration and nutrients” and recommend “workouts, dietary suggestions, and recipes to achieve identified goals.”
Image: Withings
The U-Scan Nutri Balance cartridge and app is instead designed specifically for “cycle tracking, coaching, and journaling” and provides information on “cycle predictions and ovulation window based on hormonal detection alongside key hydration and dietary biomarkers.” The user can also document other symptoms the U-Scan can’t detect, including period flow, mood, food and water intake, and cervical fluids. The hope is that, together, the U-Scan and the journaling will provide more accurate predictions and insights into a user cycle than apps that rely on journaling and self-collected data alone.
This illustration depicts a Jupiter-like exoplanet called TOI-2180 b. It was discovered in data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt
Tom Jacobs of Bellevue, Washington, loves treasure hunts. Since 2010, the former U.S. naval officer has participated in online volunteer projects that allow anyone who is interested — “citizen scientists” — to look through
Tom Jacobs, a citizen scientist who collaborates with professional scientists to look for exoplanets, at the Haleakalā High Altitude Observatory Site in Hawaii. Credit: Tom Jacobs
A graph showing starlight over time is called a “light curve.” The Visual Survey Group alerted two professional scientist collaborators — Paul Dalba at the University of California, Riverside, and Diana Dragomir, assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, that this light curve was potentially interesting.
“With this new discovery, we are also pushing the limits of the kinds of planets we can extract from TESS observations,” Dragomir said. “TESS was not specifically designed to find such long-orbit exoplanets, but our team, with the help of citizen scientists, are digging out these rare gems nonetheless.”
Computer algorithms used by professional astronomers are designed to search for planets by identifying multiple transit events from a single star. That’s why citizen scientists’ visual inspection is so useful when there is only one transit available. Since this is the only instance of the TOI-2180 b star dimming in this dataset, it is called a “single transit event.”
“The manual effort that they put in is really important and really impressive, because it’s actually hard to write code that can go through a million light curves and identify single transit events reliably,” Dalba said. “This is one area where humans are still beating code.”
But how could the team rule out other explanations for the brief dip in starlight? Could they be sure they had found a planet? They would need follow-up observations.
Fortunately, Dalba was able to recruit the Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in California. “I use that telescope to measure the wobble of the star to then determine how massive this planet is, if it is a planet at all,” he said. The research team also used the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to perform some of these measurements when Lick Observatory was threatened by wildfires.
With 27 hours of observations spread over more than 500 days, Dalba and colleagues observed the planet’s gravitational tug on the star, which allowed them to calculate the planet’s mass and estimate a range of possibilities for its orbit. Still, they wanted to observe the planet’s transit when it came back around to confirm the orbit. Unfortunately, finding a second transit event was going to be difficult because there was so much uncertainty about when the planet would cross the face of its star again.
Dalba pressed on, and organized an observing campaign including both professional astronomers and citizen scientists using telescopes at 14 sites across three continents in August 2020. To support the campaign, Dalba camped for five nights in California’s Joshua Tree National Park and looked for the transit with two portable amateur telescopes. The collaborative effort yielded 55 datasets over 11 days.
Ultimately, none of these telescopes detected the planet with confidence. Still, the lack of a clear detection in this time period put a boundary on how long the orbit could be, indicating a period of about 261 days. Using that estimate, they predict TESS will see the planet transit its star again in February 2022.
About the planet
TOI-2180 b is almost three times more massive than Jupiter but has the same diameter, meaning it is more dense than Jupiter. This made scientists wonder whether it formed in a different way than Jupiter.
Another clue about the planet’s formation could be what’s inside it. Through computer models they determined that the new planet may have as much as 105 Earth masses worth of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. “That’s a lot,” says Dalba. “That’s more than what we suspect is inside Jupiter.”
Astronomers still have much to learn about the range of planets that are out there. About 4,800 exoplanets have been confirmed, but there are thought to be billions of planets in our galaxy. The new finding indicates that among giant planets, some have many more heavy elements than others.
In our solar system, gigantic Jupiter orbits the Sun every 12 years; for
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The discovery: Water vapor in the atmosphere of planet TOI-674 b.
Key facts: This recently discovered planet, a bit bigger than Neptune and orbiting a red-dwarf star about 150 light-years away, places it in an exclusive club: exoplanets, or planets around other stars, known to have water vapor in their atmospheres. Many questions remain, such as how much water vapor its atmosphere holds. But TOI-674 b’s atmosphere is far easier to observe than those of many exoplanets, making it a prime target for deeper investigation.
Details: The planet’s distance, size and relationship to its star make it especially accessible to spaceborne telescopes. At 150 light-years, it’s considered “nearby” in astronomical terms. The star itself, relatively cool and less than half as big around as our Sun, can’t be seen from Earth with the naked eye, but this too translates into an advantage for astronomers. As the comparatively large planet – in a size-class known as “super Neptune” – crosses the face of its smallish star, starlight shining through its atmosphere can be more easily analyzed by our telescopes. Those equipped with special instruments called spectrographs – including the just-launched James Webb Space Telescope – can spread this light into a spectrum, revealing which gases are present in the planet’s atmosphere.
The discovery grew from a partnership between the tried-and-true Hubble Space Telescope and TESS, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in 2018. The planet was first found by TESS, then its light spectrum was measured by Hubble. Data from the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope also helped astronomers tease out some of the planet’s atmospheric components. If the Webb telescope, once it’s up and running, is turned on TOI-674 b, it should be able to examine the planet’s atmosphere in far more detail.
Only three other Neptune-sized exoplanets have had aspects of their atmospheres revealed so far, though the advent of telescopes like Webb promises a golden age in the study of exoplanet atmospheres.
Fun facts: The new planet can claim membership in another exclusive group: inhabitants of the so-called “Neptune Desert.” TOI-674 b orbits its small star so tightly that a “year” on this planet, once around the star, takes less than two days. But among the thousands of exoplanets confirmed in our galaxy so far, a strange pattern has emerged: Planets in the size-class between Neptune and Jupiter are extremely rare in orbits of three days or less. The rarity of such planets, and the analysis of those that do turn up, could provide important clues to the formation of planetary systems in general – including our own.
The discoverers: An international team of scientists, led by Jonathan Brande of the University of Kansas, contributed to the new study of water vapor on TOI-674 b, which has been submitted to an academic journal. They included researchers from the NASA Ames Research Center and from IPAC and other research centers at Caltech.
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Can we find another world somewhere among the stars that reminds us of our home planet? Will we know it when we see it?
In observations gathered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers stumbled on yet another mystery, and a dusty one at that. In new research, a team of scientists examines potential causes of strange signals emitted by an object dubbed TIC 400799224.
Based on what astronomers have seen so far, the researchers suggest that this object might be a binary star, or double star system, in which one of the stars is surrounded by a massive cloud of dust, the rubble of perhaps a large asteroid, according to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, home to one of the researchers on the team.
Related: The 10 biggest exoplanet discoveries of 2021
TESS is designed to spot exoplanets by looking for tiny, rhythmic dips in the brightness of a star — dips caused by a planet passing in between the telescope and the star, blocking a smidge of its light. However, planets aren’t the only phenomenon that can cause changing brightness like this, so TESS has gathered a bounty of observations on everything from supernovas (exploding stars) to triple star systems and more.
When the researchers were looking through TESS data gathered in early 2019, TIC 400799224 stood out because it became nearly 25% dimmer in just a few hours, then made several more sudden brightness changes. (TIC stands for TESS Input Catalog and references a database of “every optically persistent, stationary object in the sky,” by the way.)
An artist’s depiction of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in space. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
TESS spends about one month on a single patch of the sky then moves on, but these patches overlap, so the object was included in four different sectors observed between March 2019 and May 2021. The researchers also turned to other instruments for additional information on the strange object, incorporating data from facilities including the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae and the Las Cumbres Observatory, both networks of ground-based observatories around the globe.
Taken together, all this data let scientists piece together a picture of what might be causing the strange signal. The researchers suspect that at the heart of TIC 400799224 is a binary star in which two similar stars circle each other. But one of those stars appears to be pulsing every 19.77 days, causing the more complicated patterns; that pulsing, the astronomers argue, is caused by a massive cloud of dust surrounding the star. That dust has a combined mass equivalent to the remains of an asteroid 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide, they calculate.
The scientists consider a few different explanations for all that dust, but suggest that the most likely case is that collisions between miniature planet-like objects like asteroids are creating the dust. Still, it’s a tricky case to explain because the amount of dust hanging around seems to have remained pretty steady throughout the six years that the scientists can find existing observations of TIC 400799224. The researchers hope to continue observing the object to better understand its strange patterns.
The research is described in a paper published Dec. 8 in The Astronomical Journal.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
An optical/near-infrared image of the sky around the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) object TIC 400799224 (the crosshair marks the location of the object, and the width of the field of view is given in arcminutes). Astronomers have concluded that the mysterious periodic variations in the light from this object are caused by an orbiting body that periodically emits clouds of dust that occult the star. Credit: Powell et al., 2021
The astronomers studied TIC 400799224 with a variety of facilities including some that have been mapping the sky for longer than TESS has been operating. They found that the object is probably a binary star system, and that one of the stars pulsates with a 19.77 day period, probably from an orbiting body that periodically emits clouds of dust that occult the star. But while the periodicity is strict, the dust occultations of the star are erratic in their shapes, depths, and durations, and are detectable (at least from the ground) only about one-third of the time or less.
The nature of the orbiting body itself is puzzling because the quantity of dust emitted is large; if it were produced by the disintegration of an object like the asteroid Ceres in our solar system, it would survive only about eight thousand years before disappearing. Yet remarkably, over the six years that this object has been observed, the periodicity has remained strict and the object emitting the dust apparently has remained intact.
The team plans to continue monitoring the object and to incorporate historical observations of the sky to try to determine its variations over many decades.
Reference: “Mysterious Dust-emitting Object Orbiting TIC 400799224” by Brian P. Powell, Veselin B. Kostov, Saul A. Rappaport, Andrei Tokovinin, Avi Shporer, Karen A. Collins, Hank Corbett, Tamás Borkovits, Bruce L. Gary, Eugene Chiang, Joseph E. Rodriguez, Nicholas M. Law, Thomas Barclay, Robert Gagliano, Andrew Vanderburg, Greg Olmschenk, Ethan Kruse, Joshua E. Schlieder, Alan Vasquez Soto, Erin Goeke, Thomas L. Jacobs, Martti H. Kristiansen, Daryll M. LaCourse, Mark Omohundro, Hans M. Schwengeler, Ivan A. Terentev and Allan R. Schmitt, 8 December 2021, The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac2c81
The comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) – the largest our telescopes have ever spotted – is on a journey from the outer reaches of our Solar System that will see it flying relatively close to Saturn’s orbit. Now, a new analysis of the data we’ve collected on BB has revealed something rather surprising.
Digging into readings logged by the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) between 2018 and 2020, researchers have discovered that BB became active much earlier, and much farther out from the Sun, than was previously thought.
A comet becomes active when light from the Sun heats its icy surface, turning ice to vapor and releasing trapped dust and grit. The resulting haze, called a coma, can be useful for astronomers in working out exactly what a particular comet is made out of.
In the case of BB, it’s still too far out for water to sublimate. Based on studies of comets at similar distances, it’s likely that the emerging fog is driven instead by a slow release of carbon monoxide. Only one active comet has previously been directly observed at a greater distance from the Sun, and it was much smaller than BB.
“These observations are pushing the distances for active comets dramatically farther than we have previously known,” says astronomer Tony Farnham, from the University of Maryland (UMD).
Some clever image layering was required to detect the coma around BB: the researchers had to combine multiple snapshots from TESS, which uses long, 28-day exposures, aligning the position of the comet each time to get a better look at it.
The size of the comet – some 100 kilometers or 62 miles across – and its distance from the Sun when it became active are both the main clues that carbon monoxide is present. In fact, based on what we know about carbon monoxide, BB was likely already producing a coma before it came within sight of our telescopes.
“We make the assumption that comet BB was probably active even farther out, but we just didn’t see it before this,” says Farnham.
“What we don’t know yet is if there’s some cut-off point where we can start to see these things in cold storage before they become active.”
By repeating the image stacking technique on objects from the Kuiper belt, the researchers were able to confirm that their methods were indeed sound – and that the activity they’d spotted around BB wasn’t just a blurring effect caused by putting several images on top of each other.
All these careful calculations are useful to astronomers in working out where individual comets have come from, and from there tracing back the history of our Solar System. That’s certainly the case for BB, which continues to be of great interest to experts.
And, as our telescopes and probes get even more powerful, the comet discoveries are going to keep coming – whether that’s finding the rarest of comet types out in space, or finding comets with chemical compositions that are a long way from the norm.
“This is just the beginning,” says Farnham. “TESS is observing things that haven’t been discovered yet, and this is kind of a test case of what we will be able to find.”
“We have the potential of doing this a lot, once a comet is seen, going back through time in the images and finding them while they are at farther distances from the Sun.”
The research has been published in the Planetary Science Journal.
Thanks to data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international collaboration of astronomers has identified four exoplanets, worlds beyond our solar system, orbiting a pair of related young stars called TOI 2076 and TOI 1807.
These worlds may provide scientists with a glimpse of a little-understood stage of planetary evolution.
“The planets in both systems are in a transitional, or teenage, phase of their life cycle,” said Christina Hedges, an astronomer at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Moffett Field and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, both in California. “They’re not newborns, but they’re also not settled down. Learning more about planets in this teen stage will ultimately help us understand older planets in other systems.”
A paper describing the findings, led by Hedges, was published in The Astronomical Journal.
Stellar siblings over 130 light-years away host two systems of teenage planets. Watch to learn how NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite discovered these young worlds and what they might tell us about the evolution of planetary systems everywhere, including our own. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle)
TOI 2076 and TOI 1807 reside over 130 light-years away with some 30 light-years between them, which places the stars in the northern constellations of Boötes and Canes Venatici, respectively. Both are K-type stars, dwarf stars more orange than our Sun, and around 200 million years old, or less than 5% of the Sun’s age. In 2017, using data from ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Gaia satellite, scientists showed that the stars are traveling through space in the same direction.
Astronomers think the stars are too far apart to be orbiting each other, but their shared motion suggests they are related, born from the same cloud of gas.
Both TOI 2076 and TOI 1807 experience stellar flares that are much more energetic and occur much more frequently than those produced by our own Sun.
“The stars produce perhaps 10 times more UV light than they will when they reach the Sun’s age,” said co-author George Zhou, an astrophysicist at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. “Since the Sun may have been equally as active at one time, these two systems could provide us with a window into the early conditions of the solar system.”
TESS monitors large swaths of the sky for nearly a month at a time. This long gaze allows the satellite to find exoplanets by measuring small dips in stellar brightness caused when a planet crosses in front of, or transits, its star.
Planet TOI 1807 b is about twice Earth’s size and orbits a young dwarf, as shown in this illustration. It completes one orbit every 13 hours. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle)
Alex Hughes initially brought TOI 2076 to astronomers’ attention after spotting a transit in the TESS data while working on an undergraduate project at Loughborough University in England, and he has since graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics. Hedges’ team eventually discovered three mini-Neptunes, worlds between the diameters of Earth and Neptune, orbiting the star. Innermost planet TOI 2076 b is about three times Earth’s size and circles its star every 10 days. Outer worlds TOI 2076 c and d are both a little over four times larger than Earth, with orbits exceeding 17 days.
TOI 1807 hosts only one known planet, TOI 1807 b, which is about twice Earth’s size and orbits the star in just 13 hours. Exoplanets with such short orbits are rare. TOI 1807 b is the youngest example yet discovered of one of these so-called ultra-short period planets.
Scientists are currently working to measure the planets’ masses, but interference from the hyperactive young stars could make this challenging.
According to theoretical models, planets initially have thick atmospheres left over from their formation in disks of gas and dust around infant stars. In some cases, planets lose their initial atmospheres due to stellar radiation, leaving behind rocky cores. Some of those worlds go on to develop secondary atmospheres through planetary processes like volcanic activity.
The ages of the TOI 2076 and TOI 1807 systems suggest that their planets may be somewhere in the middle of this atmospheric evolution. TOI 2076 b receives 400 times more UV light from its star than Earth does from the Sun – and TOI 1807 b gets around 22,000 times more.
If scientists can discover the planets’ masses, the information could help them determine if missions like NASA’s Hubble and upcoming James Webb space telescopes can study the planets’ atmospheres – if they have them.
The team is particularly interested in TOI 1807 b because it’s an ultra-short period planet. Theoretical models suggest it should be difficult for worlds to form so close to their stars, but they can form farther out and then migrate inward. Because it would have had to both form and migrate in just 200 million years, TOI 1807 b will help scientists further understand the life cycles of these types of planets. If it doesn’t have a very thick atmosphere and its mass is mostly rock, the planet’s proximity to its star could potentially mean its surface is covered in oceans or lakes of molten lava.
“Many objects we study in astronomy evolve on such long timescales that a human being can’t see changes month to month or year to year,” said co-author Trevor David, a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York. “If you want to see how planets evolve, your best bet is to find many planets of different ages and then ask how they’re different. The TESS discovery of the TOI 2076 and TOI 1807 systems advances our understanding of the teenage exoplanet stage.”
Reference: “TOI-2076 and TOI-1807: Two Young, Comoving Planetary Systems within 50 pc Identified by TESS that are Ideal Candidates for Further Follow Up” by Christina Hedges, Alex Hughes, George Zhou, Trevor J. David, Juliette Becker, Steven Giacalone, Andrew Vanderburg, Joseph E. Rodriguez, Allyson Bieryla, Christopher Wirth, Shaun Atherton, Tara Fetherolf, Karen A. Collins, Adrian M. Price-Whelan, Megan Bedell, Samuel N. Quinn, Tianjun Gan, George R. Ricker, David W. Latham, Roland K. Vanderspek, Sara Seager, Joshua N. Winn, Jon M. Jenkins, John F. Kielkopf, Richard P. Schwarz, Courtney D. Dressing, Erica J. Gonzales, Ian J. M. Crossfield, Elisabeth C. Matthews, Eric L. N. Jensen, Elise Furlan, Crystal L. Gnilka, Steve B. Howell, Kathryn V. Lester, Nicholas J. Scott, Dax L. Feliz, Michael B. Lund, Robert J. Siverd, Daniel J. Stevens, N. Narita, A. Fukui, F. Murgas, Enric Palle, Phil J. Sutton, Keivan G. Stassun, Luke G. Bouma, Michael Vezie, Jesus Noel Villaseñor, Elisa V. Quintana and Jeffrey C. Smith, 12 July 2021, The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac06cd
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) handily beat its goals. The space agency has revealed that its spacecraft has spotted over 2,200 potential planets since beginning its mission in 2018. Hundreds of those are smaller planets, some of which could include rocky worlds that are more Earth-like (though not necessarily habitable).
TESS was originally expected to find 1,600 planets in its first two years.
Some of the discoveries are decidedly unusual. The rocky planet TOI-700 d is just 100 light-years away. LHS 3844 b is a “hot super-Earth” with an extremely close 11-hour orbit. TOI 1690 b is the rare survivor of a red giant star engulfing planets in its orbit, while TOI 849 b appears to be a gas giant that either lost its atmosphere or never had one.
It’s not guaranteed that every finding will hold up under scrutiny. Just 120 planets have been confirmed so far, and NASA is betting on future spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope to study candidate planets in greater detail. Even so, the sheer volume of planets has already said a lot about their variety and what it could mean for the cosmos at large.
