DEATHSTAR: A System for Confirming Planets and Identifying False-Positive Signals in TESS Data Using Ground-Based Time-Domain Surveys, Gabrielle Ross, UG '27 (E47E8636)
DEATHSTAR is a complete Python pipeline that confirms exoplanet discoveries, and is published under Ross et al. in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society December 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad3857) and live on arXiv. Exoplanets are planets that orbit their own stars outside of our solar system, just as Earth orbits the Sun. When a star or exoplanet moves in front of its host star, it is called a transit; when graphing the brightness (flux) of the host star over time it creates a light curve. Light curves with transits have a typical upside-down bell curve attribute that shows a detection in optical telescope data. MIT/NASA joint space telescope that looks for exoplanets, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), produces very clean light curves, but due to being in space, sends back low-resolution imaging. This creates false positives in the TESS exoplanet dataset and needs to be cleaned out, as sometimes instead of an exoplanet transiting in front of its host star, another star can transit and still produce a light curve. DEATHSTAR can confirm exoplanet discoveries by looking at lower precision (messier light curves) higher resolution (more pixels) telescope images and creates light curves for all the stars in the field, producing custom plots where the source of the exoplanet signal can be easily manually verified. The full code is available for anyone to use and vet their own unconfirmed exoplanets under https://github.com/GGgabbs/DEATHSTAR/tree/main.