Exoplanets, -moons, -comets

A Search for Exoplanet Candidates in TESS 2-min Light Curves using Joint Bayesian Detection

By Keith Cowing

Status Report

astro-ph.EP

May 2, 2025

Filed under astro-ph.EP, exoplanet, imaging, photometry, TESS

A Search for Exoplanet Candidates in TESS 2-min Light Curves using Joint Bayesian Detection — The frequency of quality flagged cadences as they occur in year 1 light curves. The most commonly occurring quality flags have the following keys and descriptors: 8) spacecraft is in Earth point; 128) manual exclude due to an anomaly; 2048) stray light from Earth to Moon in camera FOV; 136) unspecified; and other) all other quality flags. Broadly, the majority of flagged data is due to the spacecraft being in Earth point, and uniformly occurs over different sectors. We justify masking all flagged data as the three most commonly occurring flags are dominant and indicate a high likelihood of photometric error. — astro-ph.EP

In this work, we apply an exploratory joint Bayesian transit detector (Taaki et al. 2020), previously evaluated using Kepler data, to the 2 min simple aperture photometry light curve data in the continuous viewing zone for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) over three years of observation.

The detector uses Bayesian priors, adaptively estimated, to model unknown systematic noise and stellar variability incorporated in a Neyman-Pearson likelihood ratio test for a candidate transit signal; a primary goal of the algorithm is to reduce overfitting.

The detector was adapted to the TESS data and refined to improve outlier rejection and suppress false alarm detections in post-processing. The statistical performance of the detector was evaluated using transit injection tests, where the joint Bayesian detector achieves an 80.0 % detection rate and a 19.1% quasi-false alarm rate at a detection threshold tau = 10; this is a marginal, although not statistically significant, improvement of 0.2% over a reference sequential detrending and detection algorithm. In addition, a full search of the input TESS data was performed to evaluate the recovery rate of known TESS objects of interest (TOI) and to perform an independent search for new exoplanet candidates.

The joint detector has a 73% recall rate and a 63% detection rate for known TOI; the former considers a match against all detection statistics above threshold while the latter considers only the maximum detection statistic.

Jamila S. Taaki, Athol J. Kemball, Farzad Kamalabadi

Comments: Astronomical Journal Paper
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2504.18706 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2504.18706v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.18706
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Submission history
From: Jamila Taaki
[v1] Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:35:12 UTC (8,415 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18706

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻

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