The Daily Free Press– BU team joins NASA in the search for earth-like planets
In a recent article from The Daily Free Press, IAR’s Assistant Professor Philip Muirhead discusses his group’s work assembling a list of red dwarf planets for the new NASA satellite, TESS, to explore with Lillian Ilsley-Greene.
‘Just under three years ago, Philip Muirhead, an astronomy professor at BU, was asked to assemble a team to identify nearby red dwarf stars for NASA’s latest satellite to orbit. His team was composed of undergraduate and graduate students, other professors, and astronomers from across the world.
TESS’s mission is to find 50 terrestrial Earth-like planets, as opposed to gas planets, around nearby red dwarf stars and sun-like stars, Muirhead said. NASA’s previous Kepler mission found many of these planets, but they were too far away to study in great detail.
“The goal here is to find planets that are more like Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury,” Muirhead said. “… TESS is really a hunting mission.”’
Read the rest of the Article here: https://dailyfreepress.com/blog/2018/04/18/bu-team-joins-nasa-in-the-search-for-earth-like-planets/