The TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List

By Keivan G. Stassun, R. Oelkers, Joshua A. Pepper, M. Paegert, N. D. Lee, G. Torres, D. Latham, S. Charpinet, C. Dressing, D. Huber and 9 more. Astronomical Journal, 2017

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be conducting a nearly all-sky photometric survey over two years, with a core mission goal to discover small transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars. It will obtain 30 minute cadence observations of all objects in the TESS fields of view, along with two-minute cadence observations of 200,000–400,000 selected stars. The choice of which stars to observe at the two-minute cadence is driven by the need to detect small transiting planets, which leads to the selection of primarily bright, cool dwarfs. We describe the catalogs assembled and the algorithms used to populate the TESS Input Catalog (TIC), including plans to update the TIC with the incorporation of the Gaia second data release in the near future. We also describe a ranking system for prioritizing stars according to the smallest transiting planet detectable, and assemble a Candidate Target List (CTL) using that ranking. We discuss additional factors that affect the ability to photometrically detect and dynamically confirm small planets, and we note additional stellar populations of interest that may be added to the final target list. The TIC is available on the STScI MAST server, and an enhanced CTL is available through the Filtergraph data visualization portal system at the URL http://filtergraph.com/tess_ctl.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb9c535a10ca1eed163ed465d21f1ca9a3b93ac2

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Citations in the corpus

SOAR TESS Survey. I. Sculpting of TESS Planetary Systems by Stellar Companions (2019, methodology): “The TESS Input Catalog (TIC; Stassun et al. 2018; Stassun et al. 2019) determined the contamination from known point sources in two catalogs (APASS and 2MASS) likely to be in the TESS aperture for 3.8 million stars.”
A Revised Exoplanet Yield from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) (2018, methodology): “The reason we adopted this approach is the same reason for the construction of the CTL in the first place—our analysis of planet yield among a population of several million stars is much more tractable than conducting the analysis for all 470 million stars in TIC-6.”
TESS Eclipsing Binary Stars. I. Short-cadence Observations of 4584 Eclipsing Binaries in Sectors 1–26 (2021, background): “1 at the time of this writing; Stassun et al. 2018); all entries in the Sector table are taken from the latest version of the official pointing table44; table Origin contains identifiers for people or groups who contributed EB candidates (see Section 2).”
The Revised TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List (2019, methodology): “As discussed in Stassun et al. (2018), based on the method of reduced proper motion that we had employed, it was expected that the contamination of CTLv7 by giants would be only ∼3% but that the contamination by subgiants would be ∼40%.”