Taranga DR1: Analysis of TESS Short Cadence data for years 1 and 2

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Taranga pipeline for merging and analyzing multi-sector TESS short cadence data, providing comprehensive light curves, periodograms, and statistical results for over 200,000 stars to facilitate stellar variability studies.

Contribution

The paper presents a new data pipeline, Taranga, capable of merging multi-sector TESS light curves and performing period searches, which improves upon existing single-sector analysis methods.

Findings

Merged light curves and periodograms for 232,122 stars are available.

A database of statistical results from the analysis is provided.

The pipeline enables large-scale statistical studies of stellar variability.

Abstract

TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) was launched in 2018 with the purpose of observing bright stars in the solar neighbourhood to search for transiting exoplanets. After the completion of the two year nominal mission, TESS has provided 2\,minute cadence photometry of over 200\,000 stars. This large collection of light curves opens the possibility to study the statistical and temporal properties of this ensemble of stars. Most of the currently available data pipelines are designed to work on single sector at a time. We present a new TESS data pipeline called {\tt Taranga}, with the purpose of merging multi-sector light curves, whilst performing a period search for all the observed stars, and stores the statistical results in a database. {\tt Taranga} pipeline has three components which 1) processes the PDCSAP fluxes of each sector and creates merged PDCSAP light curve, 2) performs a similar operation on the SAP fluxes, and 3) generates the periodograms of the merged SAP and PDCSAP light curves while performing peak identification. For all the 232\,122 stars observed in short cadence in the nominal TESS mission, we provide the merged PDCSAP and SAP light-curves along with their periodograms. We provide a database that has the statistics of all the results produced from {\tt Taranga} of these stars.