Detecting Planets Around Evolved Stars with TESS
Advised by Prof. Dan Huber and Dr. Sam Grunblatt
The explosion of exoplanet detection in the last decade has enabled astronomers to study the underlying characteristics of planet populations. Planets orbiting main-sequence stars have been characterized in detail, however planets orbiting evolved stars remain mysterious due to the small sample of observed transiting planets around post-main-sequence stars.
I am conducting a search for planets around evolved stars in the TESS Full Frame Images (FFIs). I wrote a pipeline to quickly remove the scattered light from TESS which uses linear regression to isolate and remove the bright background from light curves. After de-trending the light curve, my pipeline performs a Box Least Squares (BLS) search for transiting planet signals. We selected a sample of subgiant and red giant stars, and have generated and searched over 1,000,000 light curves. Our survey has identified and confirmed fourteen new planets which were not identified by the NASA SPOC or MIT QLP pipelines, and has led to four publications (see below) with multiple upcoming papers in prep.