Daniel Apai, University of Arizona and Benjamin Rackham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NASA’s TESS spacecraft is finding hundreds of exoplanets – and is poised to find thousands more. Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there are about 1,560 stars, likely orbited by several thousand planets. About a thousand of these extrasolar planets – known as exoplanets – may be rocky and have a composition similar to Earth’s. Some may even harbor life. Over 99% of these alien worlds remain undiscovered — but this is about to change.