Quick-Look Pipeline Light Curves for 5.7 Million Stars Observed Over the Second Year of TESS' First Extended Mission

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive set of light curves for 5.7 million stars observed during TESS's second extended mission, providing valuable data for the astronomical community.

Contribution

It introduces high-level science products with light curves for millions of stars from TESS's second year, including raw and detrended data for a large and diverse stellar sample.

Findings

12.2 million light curves extracted per sector

Data includes stars brighter than T=13.5 mag and select fainter M dwarfs

One of the largest FFI-extracted light curve datasets to date

Abstract

We present High-Level Science Products (HLSPs) containing light curves from MIT's Quick-Look Pipeline (QLP) from the second year of TESS' first Extended Mission (Sectors 40 - 55; 2021 July - 2022 September). In total, 12.2 million per-sector light curves for 5.7 million unique stars were extracted from 10-minute cadence Full-Frame Images (FFIs) and are made available to the community. As in previous deliveries, QLP HLSPs include both raw and detrended flux time series for all observed stars brighter than TESS magnitude T = 13.5 mag. Starting in Sector 41, QLP also produces light curves for select fainter M dwarfs. QLP has provided the community with one of the largest sources of FFI-extracted light curves to date since the start of the TESS mission.