NASA's planet-hunting TESS discovers new exoplanet 53 light years away

NASA's planet-hunting probe - the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has discovered a new exoplanet which is said to be orbiting a star named HD 21749. The star is around 53 light years away from the Earth and is roughly 80 percent of the mass of the Sun.

Considering the newly found exoplanet is circling its star very closely, astronomers would assume that it might be potentially inhabitable, at least for the life we know. But, it's still a great discovery for TESS, which has only been in the business for a year.

TESS is supposed to be the new torchbearer for NASA's planet-hunting missions and show better results than the iconic Kepler Space Telescope, which has found over 2,500 exoplanets in its lifetime. That is around 70 percent of all the exoplanets discovered to date.

In order to discover more exoplanets, TESS leverages transit observation method which observes the potential candidate stars for brightness blips. As with the new exoplanet, it lies in very close proximity of its prime star and completes one complete orbit in 7.8 days.

Besides, Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet which is said to be 60 times bigger than our planet. The five-billion-year-old planet was discovered using NASA's exoplanet-hunting space telescope, TESS.

The exoplanet, dubbed TOI-197.0 or "hot Saturn" thanks to its size and hot temperature. The researchers at Aarhus University, Denmark say that this is "one of the best-described exoplanets of this type to date."