AC17
A planet crosses a star
A moving silhouette changes the light we receive. Follow the hidden brightness into a timed measurement, fit an actual TESS transit, then examine which star and orbit the inference assumes.
L1
What a small bite of starlight tells us
A transit blocks stellar brightness. Follow the planet’s path, the star’s darker limb and a camera exposure before turning a dip into a size.
L2
Weigh the light hidden by a planet
Derive the blocked-brightness integral, normalize quadratic limb darkening and calculate how a blended companion changes an inferred radius.
L3
Use the transit clock to measure a chord
Derive circular transit contacts, duration and conditional stellar density, then include exposure averaging and read a boundary-limited fit.
L3
Fit a frozen TESS transit without losing its assumptions
Refit real WASP-126 TESS windows with finite exposures, supplied errors and a full impact profile, then test limb brightness and dilution.
L4
Find the star that shapes the transit signal
Read fixed stellar-contamination and false-positive papers to separate a spotted light source, a blended eclipse and a conditional planet fit.
L4
Read transit duration as an orbital speedometer
Follow the photoeccentric paper’s velocity factor, density relation and posterior figures, keeping stellar information and transit selection explicit.
Sources and calculation scope
- Mandel & Agol 2002, Analytic Lightcurves, arXiv v1
3 October 2002, version 1; ApJ 580,L171–L176. Sections 2–4, uniform overlap, quadratic intensity normalization and Table 1 special cases; Section 5 states the small-planet approximation. The current archive PDF has a later typesetting header; its submission version is pinned here.
- Kipping 2010, Finite Integration Time, arXiv v1
21 April 2010, version 1. Section 2 follows contact shifts and biased parameter retrieval; Section 3.3 treats numerical integration errors around curved segments and contact discontinuities. A model window is kept distinct from an exact instrument kernel.
- TESS Science Data Products Description, Revision F
11 September 2020. Sections 2.4, 2.7, 5.2.2 and quality Table 32: time standards, frame rejection, light-curve columns and flags. The actual DR42/SPOC source header and values are frozen with the observed input; generic manual examples are not substituted for those values.
- MAST TESS Data Product Overview
Official archive overview: SAP versus PDC processing, aperture fraction and known-source crowding already corrected in PDCSAP. This is why the tutorial does not apply those corrections twice.
- batman author tutorial and pinned package 2.5.3
Author documentation for analytic quadratic limb darkening and orbit conventions. Independent reference uses the separately installed batman-package 2.5.3 distribution, verified on PyPI. Raw boundary failures are retained; published special-case elliptic and independent Cartesian integrals resolve the checked stellar-center crossing. No GPL kernel is copied into the interactive Engine.
- Maxted et al. 2016, Five WASP-South Planets, arXiv v1
4 February 2016, version 1; A&A 591,A55. Sections 2–4 and Table 6: WASP-126 discovery photometry, radial velocities, adopted orbital assumptions and initialization period 3.28880 days. The table was also checked in the original arXiv TeX source. This tutorial fits a separate later TESS product, not the discovery data.
- Rackham, Apai & Giampapa 2018, Transit Light Source Effect, v3
24 January 2018, version 3. Section 2.3 equations1–3 and Figures 2,4,6: chord versus disk spectra, modeled variability/coverage distributions and contamination spectra. These are fixed stellar-model calculations, not observed spectra or a spot-map fit to WASP-126.
- Morton et al. 2016, False Positive Probabilities, arXiv v1
10 May 2016, version 1. Sections 2.1–2.2, 3, 4.2, 4.6–4.7 define eclipse hypotheses, ancillary data, astrophysical-only scope, unresolved-host radius questions and failures. No vespa population calculation or planet-validation reproduction is claimed.
- NASA Exoplanet Archive, Kepler FPP Table Description
Official DR25 table notes retain fixed input dates, code commits, necessary prior vetting and the distinction between astrophysical false positives and instrumental false alarms. Used as the interpretation guide, not as a new FPP value for the TESS target.
- Dawson & Johnson 2012, Photoeccentric Effect I, v3
2 November 2012, version 3. Section 2 equations3–7 and Sections 3.1–3.2 with Figures 2–3: short-transit speed factor, conditional density, curved eccentricity/orientation posteriors, stellar uncertainty and transit selection. Posterior illustrations and observed applications are labeled separately.