Finessing cold planets from TESS: Microlensing and Transiting methods

  • CART Astrophysics Seminar Series

November 21, 2024 2:00 PM
PAIS 3205

Host:
Diana Dragomir
Presenter:
Mallory Harris
I often joke that I “misuse” the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) by using its observations to search for cold planets. While TESS was designed to find short-period planets, I leverage its photometric data to discover planets far from their host stars. Nearly 70% of confirmed exoplanets orbit closer than Mercury, likely due to detection biases, suggesting many unobserved cold planets may exist just beyond our current detection capabilities. Yet, by studying planets in wide orbits will allow us to find closer solar system analogs and improve our understanding its place in planetary demographics. By applying microlensing and transit detection techniques, I aim to test the limits of the TESS mission to find these planets, hoping to determine whether the architecture and planet distribution in the solar system are rare or common in the galaxy. Using TESS’s sample of approximately 3 million M dwarfs, I developed a custom pipeline to detect single-transit events and compact multiplanet systems, which I will use to improve this sample and calculate new occurrence rates for M dwarf planets. Additionally, by searching for microlensing planets with TESS through GAIA transient alerts, my collaboration and I discovered a flaring single-lens microlensing event and TESS’s first bound microlensing planet candidate. These discoveries suggest that TESS can find more microlensing planets than expected, significantly contributing to the number of known microlensing planets.

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