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High-resolution imaging essential for TESS planet validation, 72% of imaged validated planets would fail without it
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Illustration only Photo by Armand Khoury on Unsplash
A study of 443 TESS planet candidates finds that high-resolution imaging is critical for validating small planets, with 72% of imaged validated planets failing validation without their contrast curves.
For engineers building exoplanet validation pipelines, this quantifies how much a finite follow-up resource like high-resolution imaging affects the yield of validated planets. The finding that small planets below 1.7 Earth radii require imaging 100% of the time means that without such observations, the supply of small validated targets for atmospheric characterization drops sharply. This has direct implications for planning follow-up observations and for the design of validation algorithms.
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The study uses an automated TRICERATOPS pipeline to compute false-positive probabilities for 443 TESS planet candidates.
For 264 candidates with high-resolution imaging, removing contrast curves causes 72% of the 68 validated planets to fail validation.
The fraction of candidates requiring imaging decreases with planet size, from 100% below 1.7 Earth radii to 33% above 4 Earth radii, and the study validates 64 new planets.
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