Extrasolar Planet Candidates Identified by Single Transit from TESS

Abstract

Abstract The discovery of planets around stars other than Sun was a grand milestone to understand origin and evolution of life in Universe. 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to the first discovery of exoplanet around Sun-like stars, Peg 51b, in 1995. With development of 25 years, the current number of confirmed exoplanets have reached 4,000. The population of exoplanets presents great diversity and complexity beyond the planets in Solar system, severely challenging our understanding on the origin and evolution of planets. Moreover, clues of extrasolar life have been partially disclosed by detection of exoplanets in habitable zone with temporal surface temperature. In recent years, several promising surveys of exoplanets have been carried out to search for more exoplanets, compiling more complete sample of exoplanets and detecting Earth-like exoplanets. Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in 2018, is the most import facility for this purpose. It monitors the brightness of nearby stars in all sky with high cadences, searching for exoplanetary transit events. The survey is sensitive to detect terrestrial exoplanets. In this work, we reanalyzed the high quality light curves of TESS with algorithm developed by ourselves and visual examination. Our work was designed complementary to the automatic pipeline developed by TESS science team. TESS pipeline is not optimal for long-period exoplanets, for which only one transit event occurring in the observation sectors of 27.4 days, appearing as single transit single. Those long-period planets are more likely to be habitable with liquid water on their surface in relative large orbits. We took efforts to recover exoplanets with single transit in TESS. First, we identified candidates with significant narrow dimming in light curves uniformly by our automatic program. The singles were further examined visually and fitted by transit profile, selecting transit events. More precise modeling was carried out by MCMC analysis for transit exoplanet candidates. As a preliminary attempt, we only processed the light curves in sector 1 only. Full TESS dataset in all 26 sectors will be studied in future. In summary, we detected 25 exoplanet candidates in publicly accessible light curves in TESS sector 1. Among them, 14 candidates are known exoplanets, and 6 are candidates identified by TESS pipeline in catalog of Tess Objects of Interest (TOI). 5 exoplanet candidates with single transit signal are newly identified by their profiles, and the properties of these system were inferred in this work. The orbital parameters and physical properties derived by us are consistent with those in literature for all the 14 known exoplanets. 2 among 6 of exoplanet candidates in TOI catalog are single transit objects, our results are consistent with values reported in TOI catalog. For the new exoplanet candidates, we report their inferred orbits and physical sizes. We plan to implement our analysis for all light curves in 26 sectors of TESS, Over 100 exoplanet candidates are expected to be recovered, significantly contributing to the current population of 4,000 known exoplanets.