NASA’s Planet-Hunting TESS Reveals Dazzling Night Sky
May 13, 2026
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has released its most comprehensive view of the starry sky to date, filling in gaps in previous observations. Nearly 6,000 colored dots scattered across the image show the locations of confirmed or candidate exoplanets – worlds beyond our solar system – identified by the mission in September 2025 at the end of TESS’s second extended mission.
“Over the past eight years, TESS has become a fire hose for exoplanet science,” said Rebekah Hounsell, associate project scientist for TESS at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This has helped us find planets of all sizes, from tiny Mercury-like planets to those larger than Jupiter. 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.”
The TESS mission scans a wide swath of the sky, called a sector, for about a month at a time using its four cameras. These long gazes allow the spacecraft to track changes in the brightness of tens of thousands of stars, looking for variations in their light that could come from orbiting planets.
The researchers assembled an all-sky mosaic made up of 96 sectors observed between April 2018, when TESS began its work, and September 2025.
The blue dots in the image mark the locations of nearly 700 confirmed planets, as of September 9. This menagerie includes worlds that may be covered by volcanoes, destroyed by their stars, or orbiting two stars – experiencing double sunrises and sunsets every day. The orange dots represent more than 5,000 candidate planets awaiting verification.
To date, scientists have confirmed the presence of more than 6,270 exoplanets using missions such as TESS, NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope, and other facilities.
The mosaic also depicts the luminous plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, represented by a luminous arc passing through its center. The bright white ovals at the bottom left are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. These satellite galaxies are located 160,000 and 200,000 light years away, respectively.
“The deeper we dig into the large TESS data set, including using automated algorithms, the more surprises we find,” said Allison Youngblood, TESS project scientist at NASA Goddard. “In addition to planets, TESS has helped us study rivers of young stars, observe dynamic galactic behavior, and monitor near-Earth asteroids. As TESS fills more of the night sky, it’s unclear what it might see next.”
You could discover the next exoplanet! Join the TESS Planet Hunters citizen science project, and you’ll learn how to read light curves – plots of light data from distant stars – to find telltale signals from orbiting exoplanets.
By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterGreenbelt, Maryland.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
