The first Earth-sized planet discovered using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS) was found orbiting a star along with a much larger, warm planet smaller than Neptune. “It sets the path for finding smaller planets around even smaller stars, and those planets may potentially be habitable.” This is the 10th confirmed planet discovered by TESS. It was also used to measure the mass of the Neptune-like HD 21749b, something that wasn’t possible to do for the much smaller HD 21749c. Will TESS help find more Earth-sized planets? “For stars that are very close by and very bright, we expected to find up to a couple dozen Earth-sized planets,” said Dragomir.

Source: Forbes April 15, 2019 22:30 UTC