# The TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List

## TL;DR

The paper details the creation of the TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List, which prioritize stars for exoplanet detection, optimizing the TESS mission’s ability to find small transiting planets around bright, nearby stars.

## Contribution

It introduces the algorithms and ranking system used to assemble and prioritize the TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List for efficient exoplanet detection.

## Key findings

- TIC and CTL are publicly available for research use.
- The ranking system effectively prioritizes stars for small planet detection.
- The catalog enhances TESS's capability to discover small transiting exoplanets.

## Abstract

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be conducting a nearly all-sky photometric survey over two years, with a core mission goal to discover small transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars. It will obtain 30-minute cadence observations of all objects in the TESS fields of view, along with 2-minute cadence observations of 200,000 to 400,000 selected stars. The choice of which stars to observe at the 2-min cadence is driven by the need to detect small transiting planets, which leads to the selection of primarily bright, cool dwarfs. We describe the catalogs assembled and the algorithms used to populate the TESS Input Catalog (TIC). We also describe a ranking system for prioritizing stars according to the smallest transiting planet detectable, and assemble a Candidate Target List (CTL) using that ranking. We discuss additional factors that affect the ability to photometrically detect and dynamically confirm small planets, and we note additional stellar populations of interest that may be added to the final target list. The TIC is available on the STScI MAST server, and an enhanced CTL is available through the Filtergraph data visualization portal system at the URL https://filtergraph.vanderbilt.edu/tess_ctl .