A. H. M. J. Triaud

The TESS telescope's data are like a huge archive of old photographs: it already contains images of thousands of stars, but not every detail has been examined. Standard pipelines only look for the most obvious dips in a star's light when a planet passes in front of it. Fainter signals go unnoticed, like a quiet whisper in a noisy room.

Every 3.97 days, the disk of the star TOI-1080 dims slightly. The shadow lasts a few hours — a planet passing in front of its star, like a fly in front of a lamp. Such 'eclipses' are caught by the TESS space telescope, which watches thousands of stars at once.