{"id":240807,"date":"2026-07-14T05:05:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/tess-just-found-a-planet-in-a-new-way-and-more-may-be-hiding-in-its-eight-years-of-data"},"modified":"2026-07-14T05:05:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:05:49","slug":"tess-just-found-a-planet-in-a-new-way-and-more-may-be-hiding-in-its-eight-years-of-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/tess-just-found-a-planet-in-a-new-way-and-more-may-be-hiding-in-its-eight-years-of-data","title":{"rendered":"TESS just found a planet in a new way\u2014and more may be hiding in its eight years of data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tess-just-found-a-planet-in-a-new-way-and-more-may-be-hiding-in-its-eight-years-of-data.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the first time, NASA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen TESS launched, no one expected it to ever be capable of finding this kind of planet,\u201d said University of New Mexico professor Diana Dragomir. \u201cThe discovery implies that there are probably other microlensing planets hiding in TESS\u2019s data that we hadn\u2019t previously thought to look for.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Astronomers first became aware of the alerting microlensing event, called Gaia23bra b, in 2023 using ESA\u2019s (European Space Agency) now-retired Gaia space telescope. Gaia23bra b is fundamentally different from the transiting planets normally found by TESS. Instead of causing a dimming, the star-planet system magnified the light of a more distant background star (the \u201csource\u201d).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time, NASA\u2019s 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. \u201cWhen TESS launched, no one expected it to ever [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}