Comparing the performance of stellar variability filters for the detection of planetary transits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new stellar variability filtering method using spot models to enhance the detection of Earth-sized exoplanets in transit data, tested through extensive Monte Carlo simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel spot-model-based filtering technique for improving planetary transit detection, outperforming existing methods in simulated space mission data.

Findings

The new method improves detection sensitivity for Earth-sized planets.

It performs better than traditional filters across various star magnitudes.

Results are validated using simulated CoRoT and Kepler data.

Abstract

We have developed a new method to improve the transit detection of Earth-sized planets in front of solar-like stars by fitting stellar microvariability by means of a spot model. A large Monte Carlo numerical experiment has been designed to test the performance of our approach in comparison with other variability filters and fitting techniques for stars of different magnitudes and planets of different radius and orbital period, as observed by the space missions CoRoT and Kepler. Here we report on the results of this experiment.