NASA’s TESS Mission finds planetary system in a new way
July 2, 2026
For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a distant star thanks to its warping of space-time. Unlike the star-hugging transiting planets TESS regularly reveals, the newfound microlensing world is a super-Jupiter orbiting far from its host star.
When TESS launched, no one expected it to ever be capable of finding this kind of planet,” said University of New Mexico Professor Diana Dragomir. “The discovery implies that there are probably other microlensing planets hiding in TESS’s data that we hadn’t previously thought to look for.”
