BEFORE 1992 astronomers could only presume that alien planets existed. That was the year the discovery of the first such worlds,orbiting a pulsar called PSR 1257+12, about 2300 light-years from soil, and was announced. These days,astronomers believe more exoplanets than they know what to do with. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia lists 3767 confirmed worlds as of April 18th, with thousands more detections awaiting confirmation.
This torrent of discovery has made exoplanetology one of the most exciting fields in astronomy. But it is also frustrating, or for the majority of those planets are so far absent that,besides the fact of their existence, little can be learned about them. Data on most are limited to the orbits they trace around their parent stars, and estimates of their sizes and masses.
That is about to change. On April 18th a space telescope called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS),blasted into orbit from Cape Canaveral in Florida. TESS is designed to...
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Source: economist.com