{"id":449750,"date":"2026-05-15T06:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T06:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/449750\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T06:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T06:10:11","slug":"6000-alien-worlds-are-scattered-across-the-plane-of-our-galaxy-in-this-brand-new-nasa-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/449750\/","title":{"rendered":"6,000 alien worlds are scattered across the plane of our Galaxy in this brand new NASA image"},"content":{"rendered":"

This image shows 6,000 planets beyond our Solar System as scattered dots stretching across the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.<\/p>\n

It comes courtesy of NASA\u2019s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) spacecraft<\/a>, which launched in 2018 and has since been scanning the sky looking for distant worlds, known as exoplanets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nearly 6,000 coloured dots are seen in the image, revealing the locations of both confirmed exoplanets and ‘candidate’ exoplanets, i.e. planets still awaiting official confirmation.<\/p>\n

\"StillComet 3I\/ATLAS as seen by NASA’s TESS mission, 15 and 18\u201319 January 2026. Credit: NASA\/Daniel Muthukrishna, MIT<\/p>\n

\"AnAn all-sky image of the Milky Way showing nearly 6,000 confirmed (blue) and potential (yellow) exoplanets, captured by the TESS mission between 2018 and 2025. Credit: NASA\/MIT\/TESS and Veselin Kostov, University of Maryland College Park
\nTESS and the hunt for alien worlds<\/p>\n

While scientists had long expected there must be planets orbiting stars beyond our Sun, the first exoplanets weren’t confirmed until the mid 1990s.<\/p>\n

Recently, NASA announced that missions like TESS had confirmed over 6,000 exoplanets<\/a>, and astronomers say that for every star we can see in the sky, there’s at least one planet in orbit around it.<\/p>\n

“TESS has become a fire hose of exoplanet science,” says Rebekah Hounsell, a TESS associate project scientist at the\u00a0University of Maryland Baltimore County\u00a0and\u00a0NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center.<\/p>\n

\"AA view of the northern sky captured by the TESS satellite, released in the year 2000. Credit: NASA\/MIT\/TESS and Ethan Kruse USRA<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s helped us find planets of all different sizes, from tiny Mercury-like ones to those larger than Jupiter.<\/p>\n

“Some of them are even in the habitable zone, where liquid water might be possible on the surface, an important factor in our search for life beyond Earth.”<\/p>\n

TESS\u00a0scans a wide region of the sky for a month at a time using its four cameras.<\/p>\n

It looks at stars and measures changes in their brightness that could indicate a planet passing in front of the star, causing a temporary dimming of starlight.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe transit method of detecting exoplanets sees astronomers measure dips in starlight as a planet passes in front of its host star.
\nA mosaic of thousands of exoplanets<\/p>\n

The image was produced by the TESS team. It’s an all-sky mosaic made of 96 regions of the sky \u2013 or ‘sectors’ \u2013 observed by TESS between April 2018 and September 2025.<\/p>\n

Blue dots in the image show the locations of nearly 700 confirmed exoplanets, and scientists say some of these worlds could be covered in volcanoes, destroyed by their stars or even orbit two stars and therefore have two suns in their skies.<\/p>\n

Orange dots represent more than 5,000 candidate exoplanets that are awaiting verification.<\/p>\n

The glowing arc in the centre of the image is the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.<\/p>\n

\"AA artist’s impression of NASA’s TESS mission. Image Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/p>\n

Running along the lower edge of the image, just left of centre, is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy that orbits our own, larger Milky Way galaxy.<\/p>\n

“The more we dig into the large TESS dataset, especially using automated algorithms, the more surprises we find,” says Allison Youngblood, TESS project scientist at NASA Goddard.<\/p>\n

“In addition to planets, TESS has helped us study rivers of young stars, observe dynamic galactic behaviour and monitor asteroids near Earth.<\/p>\n

“As TESS fills in more of the night sky, there\u2019s no knowing what it might see next.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This image shows 6,000 planets beyond our Solar System as scattered dots stretching across the plane of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-449750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}