The new "exoplanet hunter" telescope TESS has released its first scientific image of a patch of sky in the southern hemisphere. On it you can see the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, globular clusters and stars from twelve constellations, according to the NASA website.
The TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) space telescope is positioned as a replacement for the Kepler telescope, which is almost completely exhausted. TESS was launched into space in April 2018 and is designed to search for exoplanets using transit photometry, it tracks the change in the brightness of a star as a planet passes through its disk. The main targets of the telescope are bright stars and their systems, located at a distance of 30 to 300 light years from Earth. The discovered exoplanet candidates will become targets for other observatories, both ground-based and orbiting (for example, the James Webb Space Telescope), which will engage in detailed study of objects. TESS is equipped with four 16.8 megapixel matrix telescopes, each with a 24-by-24-degree field of view. Once every 27 days, the telescope will change its observation area and over the two years of the main mission, it will create a map covering 85 percent of the entire celestial sphere.
In May, TESS sent its first test image to Earth, but did not officially start work until late July. In early August, the telescope accidentally photographed comet C / 2018 N1; in the future, the observatory will transmit new data to Earth every 13.5 days. During its first year of operation, TESS will study the 13 sectors that make up the southern sky, then observe 13 sectors of the northern sky. On Tuesday, August 7, the telescope, using all its four cameras, received its first scientific image, tracking a patch of sky in the southern hemisphere for 30 minutes.
The first scientific image of the TESS telescope.
The image includes sections of twelve constellations, from Capricorn to Painter, as well as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - the nearest irregular galaxies that are satellites of the Milky Way. Above the Small Magellanic Cloud, large globular cluster 47 Toucan is discernible, and the brightest stars in the image are Beta Crane and R Dorado, the signals from which create a blooming effect on the frames.
In early 2019, the European Space Agency plans to launch another "exoplanet hunter" - the CHEOPS telescope, which is designed to search and study exoplanets that have already been discovered, including with the help of TESS. Not so long ago, its developers announced the completion of the construction of the telescope.
Alexander Voytyuk