![The habitable-zone correction at a glance. Each symbol is a TOI placed at a distance from the centre that scales with its insolation relative to the conservative habitable zone of its host (green ring; hotter planets inside, colder outside); symbol size scales with planet radius. Left: positions from the catalogue periods, which place 28 duo-transits in the conservative habitable zone. Right: positions from the periods of this work. Of the 28, nine are resolved and only two remain in the habitable zone, both giants (TOI-4600 c and TOI-1894.01); the 19 unresolved objects, drawn with opacity proportional to their probability of lying in the habitable zone, are expected to contribute 0.0–0.1. Two planets enter the habitable zone: TOI-6478 b, a duo-transit catalogued outside it, and TOI-2298 b, a mono-transit with no catalogue period. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/Are-habitable.png?fit=1200%2C679&ssl=1)
[astro-ph.EP]. TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs) seen as single or duo transits carry a catalogue period that is undefined or equal to the separation of the two events, and their insolation and any habitable-zone label inherit it.
We reanalyse all 187 TOIs catalogued with P = 0 or P >= 200 d using all public TESS data through Sector 107, with a flux-based method that weights each alias by per-epoch transit likelihoods, the transit duration and a geometric prior, and tests for coherence, data edges, contamination by other planets and instrumental artefacts.
It recovers 12 published periods blindly and, in injection-recovery tests, 71 per cent of periods constrained by a new transit, with no wrong period. It resolves 28 periods and fixes 8 more by exclusion.
Are habitable-zone TOIs really there? Mostly not: of the 28 duo-transits that a catalogue-period criterion places in the conservative habitable zone, about two are expected to lie there, both giants, and none of the 12 planet-sized ones; those resolved are aliases of hotter planets.
Conversely, habitable-zone planets hide behind missing or wrong periods: we recover three published M-dwarf examples and validate four planets with new periods, including TOI-2298 b, a 3.0 Earth-radius sub-Neptune at 146.58 d in the conservative habitable zone of a K dwarf, and TOI-6075 b, a 1.7 Earth-radius planet at 416.5 d (833 d not excluded), the second validated transiting planet smaller than 2 Earth radii with P > 1 yr. We release alias-marginalised habitable-zone probabilities for the whole sample.
Juan F. Pagés Navarrete
Comments: 17 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. Submitted to MNRAS (MN-26-3478-P). Full version of Table 2 (alias-marginalised periods and habitable-zone probabilities for 187 TOIs) provided as an ancillary file
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2611.03019 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2611.03019v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.03019
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Submission history
From: Juan Francisco Pagés Navarrete
[v1] Mon, 2 Nov 2026 12:17:59 UTC (619 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03019
Astrobiology,
