NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) imaged about 75% of the sky (IMAGE)
Caption
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) imaged about 75% of the sky during its two-year-long primary mission. This plot dissolves between the TESS sky map and a “mass map” constructed by combining TESS measurements of 158,000 oscillating red giant stars with their distances, established by ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission. The prominent band in both images is the Milky Way, which marks the central plane of our galaxy. In the mass map, green, yellow, orange, and red show where giant stars average more than 1.4 times the Sun’s mass. Such stars evolve faster than the Sun, becoming giants at younger ages. The close correspondence of higher-mass giants with the plane of the Milky Way, which contains our galaxy's spiral arms, demonstrates that it contains many young stars.
Credit
Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA), M. Hon et al., 2021
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License
Public Domain