THE TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE: SIMULATIONS OF PLANET DETECTIONS AND ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES

By P. Sullivan, J. Winn, Z. Berta-Thompson, D. Charbonneau, D. Deming, C. Dressing, D. Latham, A. Levine, P. McCullough, Timothy Morton and 3 more. 2015

360 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA-sponsored Explorer mission that will perform a wide-field survey for planets that transit bright host stars. Here, we predict the properties of the transiting planets that TESS will detect along with the EB stars that produce false-positive photometric signals. The predictions are based on Monte Carlo simulations of the nearby population of stars, occurrence rates of planets derived from Kepler, and models for the photometric performance and sky coverage of the TESS cameras. We expect that TESS will find approximately 1700 transiting planets from 2 × 10 5 ?> pre-selected target stars. This includes 556 planets smaller than twice the size of Earth, of which 419 are hosted by M dwarf stars and 137 are hosted by FGK dwarfs. Approximately 130 of the R < 2 R ⨁ ?> planets will have host stars brighter than K s = 9 ?> . Approximately 48 of the planets with R < 2 R ⨁ ?> lie within or near the habitable zone ( 0.2 < S / S ⨁ < 2 ?> ); between 2 and 7 such planets have host stars brighter than K s = 9 ?> . We also expect approximately 1100 detections of planets with radii 2–4 R ⨁ ?> , and 67 planets larger than 4 R ⨁ ?> . Additional planets larger than 2 R ⨁ ?> can be detected around stars that are not among the pre-selected target stars, because TESS will also deliver full-frame images at a 30-minute cadence. The planet detections are accompanied by over 1000 astrophysical false positives. We discuss how TESS data and ground-based observations can be used to distinguish the false positives from genuine planets. We also discuss the prospects for follow-up observations to measure the masses and atmospheres of the TESS planets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5d14ad1545a803e95626d441cf9c79db2af5a31

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Charbonneau
2. J. Johnson
3. J. Southworth
4. Jon Fortney
5. Timothy Morton
6. J. Winn
7. G. Marcy
8. Sara Seager

In Instrumentation

1. D. Charbonneau
2. J. Southworth
3. Timothy Morton
4. J. Winn
5. J. Johnson
6. Sara Seager
7. Jon Fortney
8. G. Marcy

Citations in the corpus

• How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life (2017, background): “R⊕ planets and tens of Earth-sized planets, with a handful (<20) of these planets in the HZ of their host stars (Sullivan et al. 2015).”
• Limb and gravity-darkening coefficients for the TESS satellite at several metallicities, surface gravities, and microturbulent velocities (2016, background): “Therefore, it will be possible to investigate some fundamental planetary properties such as mass, radius, orbital dynamics, and details on the atmosphere (for more information on the mission, see Ricker et al. (2015), Sullivan et al. (2015) and references given therein).”
• Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) (2014, methodology): “The top panel of Figure 12 maps the simulated planet detections in ecliptic coordinates from the most recent TESS simulations paper.(16) Detections among the target stars (red points) are enhanced in the vicinity of the ecliptic poles because of the overlapping pointings they receive.”
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics ( ): Convective Boundaries, Element Diffusion, and Massive Star Explosions (2017, background): “…Exoplanet Survey Satellite aims to survey about 200,000 nearby G-, K-, and M-type stars with apparent magnitudes brighter than about 12 mag with a 1 minute cadence across a 400 deg2 area of the sky (Ricker et al. 2016; Sullivan et al. 2015, 2017) to open a new era of stellar variability studies.”
• Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Review of Remotely Detectable Signs of Life (2017, background): “…and accessible (via remote sensing) planet candidates are identified, for example, by the TESS mission (2018 launch; Ricker et al., 2014; Sullivan et al., 2015), the PLATO 2.0 mission (2026 launch; Rauer et al., 2014), or ground-based radial velocity (RV) or transit surveys, followed by…”
• The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, background): “A handful of transits of a small planet will be detectable over this duration only if those transits are individually large, which is why 75% of small planets detected by TESS are expected to orbit M dwarfs (Sullivan et al., 2015).”
• Characterization of the K2-18 multi-planetary system with HARPS: A habitable zone super-Earth and discovery of a second, warm super-Earth on a non-coplanar orbit (2017, background): “In the coming years the sample of habitable zone M dwarf planets is expected to increase dramatically following the launch of TESS (Ricker et al. 2014), although the majority of TESS planets will be more distant than LHS 1140 (Sullivan et al. 2015).”
• The Transit Light Source Effect: False Spectral Features and Incorrect Densities for M-dwarf Transiting Planets (2017, methodology): “…3.2 over the Bessel I-band filter bandpass, which is similar to bandpasses used by ground-based transit surveys such as MEarth (Nutzman & Charbonneau 2008) and TRAPPIST (Gillon et al. 2011; Jehin et al. 2011), and the Kepler3 and TESS (Ricker et al. 2015; Sullivan et al. 2015) spectral responses.”
• The TESS science processing operations center (2016, background): “This is accomplished by conducting an all-sky transit survey of F, G and K dwarf stars between 4 and 12 magnitudes and M dwarf stars within 200 light years.1 TESS will observe at least 200,000 stars over the course of the mission and is expected to discover ∼1,000 small planets less than four times ”