TESS Finds 1st Earth-Sized Alien World

• National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa) latest planet-hunting probe has discovered its first Earth-sized exoplanet. The probe’s newly discovered Earth-sized exoplanet is orbiting a star 53 light-years away.

The Discovery

• The Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS) also discovered a warm sub-Neptune-sized world in the same system.
• One such tool, the Planet Finder Spectrograph on the Magellan II telescope in Chile, was a crucial component of this effort. It helped confirm the planetary nature of the Tess signal, and to measure the mass of the newly discovered sub-Neptune.

Planet Finder Spectrograph

• The PFS works using a technique called the radial velocity method, ....