ExoVetter and a TESS Exoplanet Transit Search of Kepler Stars as Ground Truth

Abstract

We introduce a Python package called exoVetter that produces vetting metrics and visualizations to evaluate transiting exoplanet signals found in high-cadence time-series photometry. exoVetter is open source, modular, and independent of the mission data so that it can be easily expanded and used as part of different transit search pipelines tuned to different science cases and missions. We demonstrate its use in a pipeline as a way to distinguish real events found in a box-least squares exoplanet transit search of 324,530 light curves from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission; we limit our demonstration to stars also observed by the more sensitive Kepler telescope as a way to establish ground truth for the events found in the light curves. Using this ground truth, we provide baseline thresholds for several flux-level vetters and one centroid-offset vetter when using exoVetter metrics on TESS data. Our demonstration also indicates that it is possible to create a planet catalog from the light curves of dim targets (>13.5Tmag) that has a similar fraction of real events to that of the bright targets (<13.5Tmag) for short period events identified in the TESS-Gaia light curves.

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