You’re on a camping trip with your family and your parents tell you to turn off all the lights. But, of course, your little brother wants to shine his flashlight directly at the sky saying aliens will see it. You finally get him to shut off his flashlight, and you give your eyes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. As they do, more and more stars begin to appear in the night sky that were initially hidden beneath the glare of your (loser) brother’s flashlight. As the stars get brighter and increase in number, you start firing off a slew of questions in your head: How far away are they? Are there planets around them? What kinds of life are on those planets?

Now, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) might be one step closer to answering those questions. This is because the long-running, exoplanet-hunting spacecraft recently released its all-sky mosaic depicting both the confirmed and candidate exoplanets it has identified since its science operations started in July 2018. The mosaic is comprised of blue and orange dots showcasing 679 confirmed and more than 5,165 candidate exoplanets, respectively.

Launched in April 2018, the goal of TESS was to serve as a successor to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which conducted a primary mission from 2009 to 2013 and its follow-up K2 mission from 2014 to 2018. Kepler’s task was to focus on one patch of sky for several years to identify dips on starlight when exoplanets pass in front of their host stars, also called a transit. This patch of sky is estimated to be equivalent to your entire fist stretched out at arm’s length, or 0.25 percent of the entire sky.

When two of Kepler’s stabilizing reaction wheels broke, preventing Kepler from steering, the mission was redesignated as K2, which observed several patches of the sky. In the end, both missions successfully confirmed the existence of more than 3,000 exoplanets and another 3,000 exoplanet candidates. Essentially, TESS unofficially combined the Kepler and K2 missions into a single mission as it has spent almost the last eight years scanning the entire heavens with the goal of identifying transiting exoplanets.

“Over the last eight years, TESS has become a fire hose of exoplanet science,” said Dr. Rebekah Hounsell, who is a TESS associate project scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It’s helped us find planets of all different sizes, from tiny Mercury-like ones to those larger than Jupiter. Some of them are even in the habitable zone, where liquid water might be possible on the surface, an important factor in our search for life beyond Earth.”

A key TESS discovery was the TOI-700 system, which TESS first identified and whose findings were later confirmed with ground-based telescopes. The TOI-700 system is located approximately 100 light-years from Earth with TESS successfully identifying three exoplanets, TOI-700 b, c, and d, and all of which are approximately Earth-sized, with TOI-700 d estimated to be orbiting within its host star’s habitable zone. With the host star being a red dwarf star, which is smaller and cooler than our Sun, scientists estimate that TOI-700 d gets approximately 86 percent of the solar radiation that Earth gets from our Sun.

Another key discovery was TOI-1338 b, which was the first circumbinary exoplanet discovered by TESS, which are exoplanets that orbit two stars, with the stars in the TOI-1338 system being an F-type star at approximately 10 percent larger than our Sun and a smaller M-dwarf (red dwarf) star.

While TESS has been operating since mid-2018, it has received funding for several extended missions, with a recent article published in Space Science Reviews noting how TESS’ third extended mission is slated to run until at least September 2028.

What new insights into exoplanets will TESS give scientists in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The Trump administration on Tuesday sued the University of California, alleging that UCLA is “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitic harassment of Jewish students, marking the government’s third lawsuit against the UC this year and a sharp escalation of federal civil rights pressure on the nation’s largest public research university system.

The 53-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleges UCLA violated federal civil rights by tolerating a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. The attack prompted Israel’s war in Gaza, which drew widespread student protests and pro-Palestinian encampments in the spring, including one at UCLA that was the site of a violent melee the night of April 30, 2024.

The government is asking the court to force UCLA to repay federal grant money going back more than two years — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars — bar it from new federal contracts until it’s deemed in compliance with civil rights law, and install an independent court-appointed monitor that would oversee its civil rights practices. The department is also asking for the court to force reforms to UCLA’s antidiscrimination procedures.

The demands are much narrower than the wide-reaching changes to campus policies and culture the Trump administration sought from UCLA in August 2025, when it unsuccessfully proposed the university pay roughly $1.2 billion to settle allegations of civil rights violations.

The suit centers on the encampment, alleging masked demonstrators “kicked and slapped Jews, beat Jews with sticks, and assaulted Jews with pepper spray.” The Trump administration said UCLA leaders “took no serious action whatsoever” until May 2, 2024, when police cleared the camp.

The legal filing also alleges that campus leaders have failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students up through this year. To make the case, court documents cite rallies held by Students for Justice in Palestine groups, which are banned as formal UCLA organizations but have continued to hold unauthorized protests on campus. The group includes members and supporters who are Jewish.

“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”

Responding to the suit Tuesday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk said “the suggestion that UCLA has been passive in the face of antisemitism is simply wrong. Combating antisemitism is a moral imperative — one rooted, for me, in personal history that makes indifference unthinkable.” Frenk is a grandchild of Holocaust survivors.

“In the past year alone, we’ve taken numerous concrete actions to combat antisemitism. We recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety. We reorganized our Civil Rights Office. We appointed a Title VI officer. And we strengthened our policies to protect both free expression and the safety of every member of our community,” Frenk said.

The Justice Department filed its suit the same morning that Frenk gave his first “state of campus” annual address. The chancellor did not mention the court case in his speech. But he said UCLA was focused on combating antisemitism and “all forms of hatred and bigotry.” Frenk said UCLA, during his tenure that began in January of last year, has been focused on replacing “good intentions with specific actions.”

Suit cites UCLA’s antisemitism task force

The suit draws several of its allegations from a 2024 report produced by UCLA’s former Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which late that fall faulted UCLA for “broad-based perceptions of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias on campus.”

That group transformed into UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, which produced a report this month saying UCLA has made strides in improving campus culture, including new training and reforms to the civil rights complaint system, while still having more work to do.

In the wake of campus protests in 2024, UCLA also commissioned a task force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, which found “increased harassment, violence, and targeting” of those groups since 2024 and suggested reforms to policing and protest rules on campus that it said unfairly targeted pro-Palestinian voices. The Justice Department’s lawsuit does not address those concerns.

The new legal filing adds to a growing list of Justice Department actions against UC this year.

In January, the Trump administration joined a lawsuit alleging UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine used a “systemically racist approach” to admissions that privileged Black and Latino applicants over white and Asian American ones, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling barring race-based affirmative action.

In February, the Justice Department sued UC alleging UCLA administrators “routinely ignored” and “failed to report” employee complaints of antisemitism, citing what the department called a “severe and pervasive” workplace problem dating to the 2023 onset of the Israel-Hamas war.

The Justice Department has also recently widened its civil rights scrutiny of the state’s medical schools beyond UCLA. In March, the department division opened investigations into whether UC San Diego and Stanford engaged in racial discrimination in medical school admissions, demanding seven years of applicant data and putting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding potentially at risk. Both schools have said they comply with state and federal antidiscrimination laws.