Exoplanet Transit Animations
When a planet passes directly between a star and its observer, it dims the star's light by a measurable amount. Light curves get complicated when more planets are transiting a star. The combined light curves can give us the same information as a single one, it just takes more work from astronomers to pick out each planet in the data.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Related pages
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ID: 12884 Produced Video
TESS Shorts
Read moreThe Unique Orbit of NASA’s Newest Planet HunterNASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite - TESS will fly in an orbit that completes two circuits around the Earth every time the Moon orbits. This special orbit will allow TESS’s cameras to monitor each patch of sky continuously from nearly a month at a time. To get into this orbit, TESS will make a series of loops culminating in a lunar gravitational-assist, which will give it the push it needs. TESS will reach its orbit about 60 days after launch.Music: "Drive to Succeed" from Killer TracksComplete transcript available.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. ||
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ID: 12850 Produced Video
NASA's New Planet Hunter: TESS
Read moreWatch an overview of the TESS mission.Music: "Drive to Succeed" from Killer TracksWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. || NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find undiscovered worlds around bright nearby stars, providing targets where future studies will assess their capacity to harbor life. TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. Four wide-field cameras will give TESS a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of the entire sky. Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that TESS will observe one by one. The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky. The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away TESS will concentrate on stars less than 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets. The brightness of these target stars will allow researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water and other key molecules in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life. ||
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