TY - JOUR
T1 - The T16 Planet Hunt
T2 - 10,000 New Planet Candidates from TESS Cycle 1 and the Confirmation of a Hot Jupiter around TIC 183374187 This paper includes data gathered with the 6.5 m Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile
AU - Roth, Joshua T.
AU - Hartman, Joel David
AU - Bakos, Gáspár
AU - Yee, Samuel W.
AU - Bouma, Luke G.
AU - Galarza, Jhon Yana
AU - Teske, Johanna K.
AU - Butler, R. P.
AU - Crane, Jeffrey D.
AU - Shectman, Steve
AU - Osip, David
AU - Vissapragada, Shreyas
AU - Beletsky, Yuri
AU - Kanodia, Shubham
AU - Gaibor, Yadira
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2026. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
PY - 2026/5
Y1 - 2026/5
N2 - The T16 project has produced a uniformly detrended and systematics-corrected set of 83,717,159 TESS Cycle 1 full-frame image (FFI) light curves for stars observed by TESS in its primary mission down to T = 16 mag, enabling sensitive transit searches beyond the official TESS pipelines. While most existing TESS planet searches focus on relatively bright targets, planet occurrence rates suggest that a substantial number of planets should exist around fainter stars. We therefore use the T16 light curves to conduct a semiautomated search for transiting exoplanets across the full Cycle 1 FFI sample, resulting in 11,554 planet candidates orbiting stars down to the 16th magnitude in the TESS band, with orbital periods between 0.5 and 27 days. Of these, 10,091 are new planet candidates, and 411 are single-transit events, for which we do not attempt to determine orbital parameters. The remaining 1052 candidates are previously known TESS candidates. We validate our pipeline through Magellan/Planet Finder Spectrograph radial-velocity follow-up measurements on one of our candidate hosts, TIC 183374187, a metal-poor thick-disk star, confirming the signal as a newly identified hot Jupiter, which we call TIC 183374187 b. This detection demonstrates our pipeline’s ability to identify real, previously undiscovered, transiting planets. Overall, this work shows that large-scale, machine learning–assisted transit searches of TESS FFIs can significantly expand the census of transiting planet candidates, in particular around faint stars, providing a rich target set for future validation and follow-up efforts. Our findings more than double the number of known TESS exoplanet candidates.
AB - The T16 project has produced a uniformly detrended and systematics-corrected set of 83,717,159 TESS Cycle 1 full-frame image (FFI) light curves for stars observed by TESS in its primary mission down to T = 16 mag, enabling sensitive transit searches beyond the official TESS pipelines. While most existing TESS planet searches focus on relatively bright targets, planet occurrence rates suggest that a substantial number of planets should exist around fainter stars. We therefore use the T16 light curves to conduct a semiautomated search for transiting exoplanets across the full Cycle 1 FFI sample, resulting in 11,554 planet candidates orbiting stars down to the 16th magnitude in the TESS band, with orbital periods between 0.5 and 27 days. Of these, 10,091 are new planet candidates, and 411 are single-transit events, for which we do not attempt to determine orbital parameters. The remaining 1052 candidates are previously known TESS candidates. We validate our pipeline through Magellan/Planet Finder Spectrograph radial-velocity follow-up measurements on one of our candidate hosts, TIC 183374187, a metal-poor thick-disk star, confirming the signal as a newly identified hot Jupiter, which we call TIC 183374187 b. This detection demonstrates our pipeline’s ability to identify real, previously undiscovered, transiting planets. Overall, this work shows that large-scale, machine learning–assisted transit searches of TESS FFIs can significantly expand the census of transiting planet candidates, in particular around faint stars, providing a rich target set for future validation and follow-up efforts. Our findings more than double the number of known TESS exoplanet candidates.
KW - Exoplanet detection methods (489)
KW - Radial velocity (1332)
KW - Transit photometry (1709)
KW - Transits (1711)
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037549892
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037549892#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.3847/1538-4365/ae5b6c
DO - 10.3847/1538-4365/ae5b6c
M3 - Article
SN - 0067-0049
VL - 284
JO - Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series
JF - Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series
IS - 1
ER -