The TESS Triple-9 Catalog: 999 uniformly vetted candidate exoplanets

TL;DR

The paper presents the TESS Triple-9 catalog, a uniformly vetted list of 999 exoplanet candidates from TESS data, combining automated vetting with citizen science to improve candidate validation and facilitate follow-up studies.

Contribution

It introduces the TT9 catalog, created using the DAVE pipeline and citizen science, marking the first comprehensive, uniform vetting of a significant portion of TESS exoplanet candidates.

Findings

Over 70% of TOIs in TT9 are confirmed as true candidates.

144 candidates flagged as false positives.

146 candidates identified as potential false positives.

Abstract

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected thousands of exoplanet candidates since 2018, most of which have yet to be confirmed. A key step in the confirmation process of these candidates is ruling out false positives through vetting. Vetting also eases the burden on follow-up observations, provides input for demographics studies, and facilitates training machine learning algorithms. Here we present the TESS Triple-9 (TT9) catalog -- a uniformly-vetted catalog containing dispositions for 999 exoplanet candidates listed on ExoFOP-TESS, known as TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs). The TT9 was produced using the Discovery And Vetting of Exoplanets pipeline, DAVE, and utilizing the power of citizen science as part of the Planet Patrol project. More than 70% of the TOIs listed in the TT9 pass our diagnostic tests, and are thus marked as true planetary candidates. We flagged 144 candidates as false positives, and identified 146 as potential false positives. At the time of writing, the TT9 catalog contains ~20% of the entire ExoFOP-TESS TOIs list, demonstrates the synergy between automated tools and citizen science, and represents the first stage of our efforts to vet all TOIs. The DAVE generated results are publicly available on ExoFOP-TESS.