Photometry of 10 Million Stars from the First Two Years of TESS Full Frame Images

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive set of light curves for nearly 10 million stars from TESS's first two years, utilizing the MIT QLP pipeline, providing the largest publicly available TESS photometry dataset.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, high-quality photometric dataset from TESS's primary mission, including detailed reduction and detrending methods, and makes it publicly accessible.

Findings

Largest collection of TESS photometry to date

Demonstrated noise properties align with theoretical expectations

Provided high-quality light curves for over 10 million stars

Abstract

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the first high-precision full-sky photometry survey in space. We present light curves from a magnitude limited set of stars and other stationary luminous objects from the TESS Full Frame Images, as reduced by the MIT Quick Look Pipeline (QLP). Our light curves cover the full two-year TESS Primary Mission and include $\sim$ 14,770,000 and $\sim$ 9,600,000 individual light curve segments in the Southern and Northern ecliptic hemispheres, respectively. We describe the photometry and detrending techniques we used to create the light curves, and compare the noise properties with theoretical expectations. All of the QLP light curves are available at MAST as a High Level Science Product via doi.org/10.17909/t9-r086-e880 (https://archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/qlp). This is the largest collection of TESS photometry available to the public to date.