Eclipsing Binary Patrol

Check out this page of educational resources on TESS to learn more about the mission and its goals and results so far.

This NASA-JPL page is aimed at students from Grades 6-12 with educational resources on Exoplanets and further background on lightcurves and orbital period calculations

Glossary

This is an evolving glossary with some of the technical terms we are using throughout the project - you can also find more explanations about them on the FAQ and Field Guides. Please be sure include your suggestions for this glossary via the Talk page!

• Binary Star: pairs of stars orbiting around each other
• Orbital Period: The amount of time a given astronomical object takes to complete one orbit around another object.
• Exoplanet: Any planet beyond our solar system
• Lightcurve: It is a graph that shows the brightness of an object (in this case, our target star observed by TESS) over a period of time.
• Phase-folded lightcurve: Phase-folding is simply cutting the entire lightcurve into equal-length segments and stacking all segments on top of each other. Check out this video from the Planet Hunters project to learn more (including examples of data handling for their project)