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yesterday

AI Reanalysis of TESS Data Flags About 10,000 New Exoplanet Candidates

Most candidates await confirmation through follow-up observations.

The 'Milky Way' is seen in the night sky around telescopes and camps of people over rocks in the White Desert north of the Farafra Oasis southwest of Cairo May 16, 2015. The White Desert, about 500 km southwest of the Egyptian capital Cairo, features limestone and chalk forms strangely shaped by the wind and sand, a terrain that gains in intensity when illuminated by the moon. Slightly to the north lies the Black Desert, given its name by the volcanic rock dolerite, similar to basalt. Four-by-four and trekking trips for tourists include Bedouin music around campfires and nights slept under a breathtaking array of stars. Picture taken May 16, 2015. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
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Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. Most can be studied only indirectly, but scientists know they vary widely, as depicted in this artist’s concept, from small, rocky worlds and gas giants to water-rich planets and those as hot as stars.
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Overview

  • A Princeton-led team used machine learning on TESS’s first-year sky survey to identify 10,091 new multi-transit planet candidates.
  • The search scanned light curves from 83 million faint stars with Random Forest classifiers, then human reviewers checked the signals.
  • The study lists 11,554 candidates in total, including 411 single-transit events that need more passes to pin down orbits.
  • The results appear in an arXiv preprint and have not been peer reviewed, so each object remains a candidate until follow-up confirms a true planet.
  • NASA separately released a full-sky TESS mosaic through September 2025 that charts 679 confirmed planets and 5,165 earlier candidates for context.