TESS caught a super-Jupiter 40,000 light-years away through gravitational microlensing - for a telescope whose normal range is 150 light-years, this is a first.
- TESS made its first discovery through gravitational microlensing: Gaia23bra b, a super-Jupiter with 1.6 Jupiter masses (July 1).
- Almost 40,000 light-years away, for a telescope with a usual range of about 150; the star is an orange dwarf with 80% of the Sun's mass.
- The signal was dug out of archival data, after Gaia caught the flare in 2023; published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
NASA announced TESS's first discovery through gravitational microlensing (a method that uses a star's gravity as a lens): Gaia23bra b, a super-Jupiter with 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter, almost 40,000 light-years from us. For a telescope built to watch transits of nearby stars - usually up to 150 light-years - this is an entirely new mode of operation.
The beauty here isn't the planet. The beauty is the method. The discovery was sitting in the archive. Nobody pointed the telescope anew - the team dug it out of data collected for something else entirely.
More and more, the next discovery will come from sifting through old data with new eyes. Science's archives are full of buried signals. And that's exactly where machines see well, where you and I would have walked right past.