[astro-ph.EP] The PLATO mission will observe its first long-pointing field, LOPS2 (Long-duration Observation Phase, South field), for at least two years, bringing the habitable zones (HZ) of its M-dwarf sample within reach of a transit search.
The completeness and false-alarm rate of a pipeline validated on TESS M dwarfs are measured on simulated PLATO photometry and converted into a candidate-level forecast for the LOPS2 M dwarfs.
Simulated PLATO light curves (717 d baseline; three stellar cells of the faint half of the sample) were processed end to end in two arms, without and with a pre-launch model of the instrument systematics: 930 in the first (465 realisations, 525 injected planets, 465 noise-only twins) and 790 in the second.
Injected planets measure completeness against the expected signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), separately for the long-period regime of the HZ; noise-only twins measure the false-alarm rate against the floor on the red-noise-aware statistic S/N_pink. Completeness reaches 50% at S/N = 7.7 +/- 0.15 over all periods and 8.6 +/- 0.3 in the long-period regime.
The false-alarm rate falls from 79 +/- 2% to 0.6% as the S/N_pink floor rises from 6 to 8, and 6 +/- 1% at the adopted floor 7.5 (completeness 54 +/- 2%). In the field, the 50 known transiting objects of interest (19 confirmed planets, 31 candidates) would all be recovered; a transiting HZ planet of 1.0 (1.5) Earth radii would be recovered as a candidate with ~40% (65%) probability, giving about 4 HZ Earths and 7 super-Earths over 16 929 field M dwarfs.
The systematics arm shifts the 50% point by +0.54 (+0.27/-0.22) in S/N, a penalty localised on the transition, leaving the floor robust and negligible on the long-period injections that feed the HZ.
Habitable-zone Earths around the PLATO M dwarfs sit at the measured detection frontier, where completeness and reliability, both measurable before launch, decide the yield.
Yohann Tschudi
Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.04887 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2609.04887v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04887
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Submission history
From: Yohann Tschudi
[v1] Fri, 4 Sep 2026 08:44:06 UTC (93 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04887
Astrobiology,
