The TESS telescope photographed the sky for a full year, but its standard pipeline skipped over dim stars. The T16 project took the same images and cleaned them from scratch — resulting in 83,717,159 light curves, like EKGs for every star. Planets passing in front of their star briefly dim it, and these dips in the EKGs are what we look for.
An automated search using machine learning combed through all the data and found 11,554 exoplanet candidates. Of these, 10,091 are new — never seen before. For 411 candidates, only one transit was caught over the year — too rare to pin down an orbit, but enough to suspect a planet.
One candidate was checked individually: a dip was noticed around star TIC 183374187, and then the star's slight wobble from the planet's gravity was measured. This confirmed a hot Jupiter — a giant planet orbiting very close to its star. So the method works and finds real planets, not just noise.
Now the list of known TESS exoplanet candidates has more than doubled. It's like a census that suddenly counted residents of remote villages. Next step: verify each candidate with other telescopes and hunt for the most interesting worlds among them.
Among the found candidates, 411 are 'one-hit wonders': the planet transited its star only once during the entire year of observations, leaving its orbit unknown.
In the series 'The Expanse,' humanity spreads across systems around dim stars — exactly the kind of worlds this project seeks.