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[music throughout] Narrator: NASA’s TESS mission just discovered its first circumbinary

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planet—a world orbiting two stars instead of one.

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Named TOI 1338 b, it’s nearly the size of Saturn

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and orbits its stars every 95 days. The two stars

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orbit each other and consist of a small, cool M dwarf and one much like

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the Sun. Together, they form what is called an eclipsing binary,

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which means the stars regularly pass in front of each other form our point of view.

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TESS hunts for planets in these and other systems by looking

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for tiny, regular dips in starlight called transits. TESS saw

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TOI 1338 b’s transits of the large star, but spotting them

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in the data wasn’t easy. A high school intern examined hundreds of

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eclipsing binaries to search for planetary transits, which can look similar to

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some of the eclipses. Ultimately, he uncovered transits

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caused by the planet. If you could orbit

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TOI 1338 b, you’d have a front-row seat to see its suns

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eclipse each other every 15 days. But the angle of the planet’s orbit

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around the stars changes over time. After 2023,

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we won’t see it pass in front of the stars for another 8 years.

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TESS will observe hundreds of thousands of eclipsing binaries, so there may be other

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planets similar to TOI 1338 b waiting

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to be discovered.
[music]

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[music]