Oh, the things we've seen! An unexpected journey through NASA's TESS mission

Designed to discover thousands of exoplanets around the brightest and nearest stars to us, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission has just embarked on its second extension. Over the past four years, TESS has been extraordinarily successful at its main task, with nearly 250 confirmed new exoplanets found so far, and 6000 planet candidates (of which the vast majority are expected to be true planets) waiting to be verified. While, the most conspicuous legacy of TESS will be the discovery of individual systems suitable for detailed atmospheric characterization with facilities such as JWST, I will show how the survey is revolutionizing the field of exoplanet science in other ways as well, often with only minimal follow-up (non-TESS) observations.

Exceeding expectations, TESS data has also enabled significant studies in other areas of astronomy: the interiors of giant stars and their preferred location in the Milky Way, the frequency of stellar flares, outbursting active galaxies, binary star systems about to go supernova, star-shredding black holes, and the properties of Solar System asteroids and comets. It’s amazing what can be found just by staring at a large swath of sky continuously for 27 days.

In this talk, I will give an overview of TESS’ planet discoveries and describe the vibrant community process that leads from the discovery to the confirmation of these planets. I will also highlight a range of TESS’ non-exoplanet discoveries, and end with my view of what we might expect from the mission in the coming years.