Searching for Free-Floating Planets with TESS: Results from Sectors 61-65
Michelle Kunimoto, William DeRocco, Nolan Smyth, Steve Bryson, B. Scott Gaudi

TL;DR
This paper reports a preliminary search for free-floating planets using TESS data, finding one candidate event and discussing its implications and false positive possibilities, contributing to the understanding of rogue planet detection.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method of searching for free-floating planets in TESS data and discusses the challenges of false positives in space-based microlensing surveys.
Findings
One candidate short-duration microlensing event detected
Event's characteristics are consistent with a low-mass free-floating planet
Discussion of false positive scenarios and their challenges
Abstract
Though free-floating planets (FFPs) may outpopulate their bound counterparts in the terrestrial-mass range, they remain one of the least explored exoplanet demographics. Due to their negligible electromagnetic emission at all wavelengths, the only observational technique able to detect these worlds is gravitational microlensing. Microlensing by terrestrial-mass FFPs induces rare, short-duration magnifications of background stars, requiring high-cadence, wide-field surveys to detect these events. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), though designed to detect close-bound exoplanets via transits, boasts a Full-Frame Image cadence as short as 200 seconds and has monitored hundreds of millions of stars, providing a unique dataset in which to search for rare short-duration transients. We have performed a preliminary search for FFP microlensing in 7.5 million light curves from…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstro and Planetary Science · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
