Quick-Look Pipeline Lightcurves for 9.1 Million Stars Observed Over the First Year of the TESS Extended Mission

TL;DR

This paper provides a large set of lightcurves for 9.1 million stars observed during the first year of TESS's Extended Mission, extracted using the Quick-Look Pipeline for exoplanet transit searches.

Contribution

It introduces a magnitude-limited, extensive lightcurve dataset from TESS's Extended Mission, available as High-Level Science Products for the community.

Findings

Lightcurves for 9.1 million stars are publicly available.

Includes raw and detrended flux data for stars brighter than T=13.5.

Enables large-scale exoplanet transit analysis.

Abstract

We present a magnitude-limited set of lightcurves for stars observed over the TESS Extended Mission, as extracted from full-frame images (FFIs) by MIT's Quick-Look Pipeline (QLP). QLP uses multi-aperture photometry to produce lightcurves for ~1 million stars each 27.4-day sector, which are then searched for exoplanet transits. The per-sector lightcurves for 9.1 million unique targets observed over the first year of the Extended Mission (Sectors 27 - 39) are available as High-Level Science Products (HLSP) on the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). As in our TESS Primary Mission QLP HLSP delivery (Huang et al. 2020), our available data products include both raw and detrended flux time series for all observed stars brighter than TESS magnitude T = 13.5, providing the community with one of the largest sources of FFI-extracted lightcurves to date.