IAF SYMPOSIUM ON ONGOING AND NEAR FUTURE SPACE ASTRONOMY AND SOLAR-SYSTEM SCIENCE MISSIONS(A7)

Worlds orbiting other stars, exoplanets, are currently being discovered at a staggering rate. To aid with these efforts, we are developing a new tool to search for the hidden signatures of planets orbiting other stars. These worlds are the target of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a state-of-the-art space telescope that is systematically scanning the entire sky, looking at hundreds of thousands of stars for micro-eclipses caused when a world transits across the disk of a distant star. Our new tool uses models of these transits, created using BAsic Transit Model cAlculatioN (BATMAN), and automatically compares them with light from stars observed by TESS and reports when it finds a match. We present preliminary results that confirm detections of known exoplanets using our tool and discuss ideas for applying our model to a larger dataset of TESS observations. We believe our tool will help aid in the discovery of more exoplanets with future space telescopes such as the James Webb Telescope, aid in the search for life outside the solar system, and potentially find new worlds that can be habitable for humans in the future. Why is this important? The search for exoplanets has become one of the hottest topics in astrophysics and astronomy research. The overarching question that humanity is asking itself, are we alone in the universe? An important part of the search for extraterrestrial life is finding planets like Earth that have conditions conducive enough for intelligent life to evolve and become advanced.