ExoVetter and a TESS Exoplanet Transit Search of Kepler Stars as Ground Truth
Abstract
We introduce a Python package called exoVetter that produces vetting metrics and visualizations to evaluate transiting exoplanet signals found in high-cadence time-series photometry. exoVetter is open source, modular, and independent of the mission data so that it can be easily expanded and used as part of different transit search pipelines tuned to different science cases and missions. We demonstrate its use in a pipeline as a way to distinguish real events found in a box-least squares exoplanet transit search of 324,530 light curves from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission; we limit our demonstration to stars also observed by the more sensitive Kepler telescope as a way to establish ground truth for the events found in the light curves. Using this ground truth, we provide baseline thresholds for several flux-level vetters and one centroid-offset vetter when using exoVetter metrics on TESS data. Our demonstration also indicates that it is possible to create a planet catalog from the light curves of dim targets (>13.5Tmag) that has a similar fraction of real events to that of the bright targets (<13.5Tmag) for short period events identified in the TESS-Gaia light curves.
Versions
Related
- ExoMOD II. A Statistical Model of Transit Timing Variations in Kepler Multi-Planet Systems
- Rescuing Kepler’s False Positives: A Possible Habitable Zone Exoplanet in the Triple-star System KOI-1623
- Constraining exoplanet population parameters with Kepler and simulation-based inference
- Rescuing Kepler's False Positives: A Possible Habitable Zone Exoplanet in the Triple Star System KOI-1623
- ExoEcho: Exoplanet Ephemerides Change Observations. III. A JWST Survey for Transit Timing Variations of 37 Exoplanets
BibTeX
@misc{dallas2026exovetter,
title = {{ExoVetter and a TESS Exoplanet Transit Search of Kepler Stars as Ground Truth}},
author = {Matthew M. Dallas and Susan E. Mullally and Fergal Mullally and Michelle Kunimoto and Te Han and Timothy D. Brandt},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.32949},
eprint = {2610.32949},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32949},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - ExoVetter and a TESS Exoplanet Transit Search of Kepler Stars as Ground Truth
AU - Matthew M. Dallas
AU - Susan E. Mullally
AU - Fergal Mullally
AU - Michelle Kunimoto
AU - Te Han
AU - Timothy D. Brandt
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.32949
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32949
AB - We introduce a Python package called exoVetter that produces vetting metrics and visualizations to evaluate transiting exoplanet signals found in high-cadence time-series photometry. exoVetter is open source, modular, and independent of the mission data so that it can be easily expanded and used as part of different transit search pipelines tuned to different science cases and missions. We demonstrate its use in a pipeline as a way to distinguish real events found in a box-least squares exoplanet transit search of 324,530 light curves from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission; we limit our demonstration to stars also observed by the more sensitive Kepler telescope as a way to establish ground truth for the events found in the light curves. Using this ground truth, we provide baseline thresholds for several flux-level vetters and one centroid-offset vetter when using exoVetter metrics on TESS data. Our demonstration also indicates that it is possible to create a planet catalog from the light curves of dim targets (>13.5Tmag) that has a similar fraction of real events to that of the bright targets (<13.5Tmag) for short period events identified in the TESS-Gaia light curves.
ER -