The holy grail of exoplanets research is to find an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around its star (where it's not too hot and not too cold for life to exist) and then study its atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope to determine if life is present there. But to do that, we have to find these planets first. This is where the TESS mission comes in; this month a research paper was published claiming to have found TWO possible Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. The hope is that we can use JWST to study at least one of them.

Dransfield et al. (2024) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.06206.pdf
My previous video on the history of exoplanets and how we discovery them -    • The discovery of the first exoplanet ...  
My video from last week on JWST directly imaging two new exoplanets -    • JWST discovers exoplanets orbiting DE...  
Video on what phase folding of exoplanet light curves is -    • What is phase folding and how can it ...  

00:00 - Introduction
00:51 - The TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission
02:06 - How we find exoplanets
03:59 - Why the majority of habitable zone planets are around M-dwarf stars
05:31 - The red dwarf star TOI-715
06:21 - The first planet found: TOI-715b
07:14 - The second planet candidate TIC 271971130.02
08:10 - Can we study their atmospheres with JWST?
10:46 - Bloopers

Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7-IV


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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


http://drbecky.uk.com
https://rebeccasmethurst.co.uk