Searching for Free-Floating Planets with TESS: I. Discovery of a First Terrestrial-Mass Candidate
arxiv(2024)
摘要
Though free-floating planets (FFPs) that have been ejected from their natal
star systems may outpopulate their bound counterparts in the terrestrial-mass
range, they remain one of the least explored exoplanet demographics. Due to
their negligible electromagnetic emission at all wavelengths, the only
observational technique able to detect these worlds is gravitational
microlensing. Microlensing by terrestrial-mass FFPs induces rare,
short-duration magnifications of background stars, requiring high-cadence,
wide-field surveys to detect these events. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite (TESS), though designed to detect close-bound exoplanets via the
transit technique, boasts a cadence as short as 200 seconds and has monitored
hundreds of millions of stars, making it well-suited to search for
short-duration microlensing events as well. We have used existing data products
from the TESS Quick-Look Pipeline (QLP) to perform a preliminary search for FFP
microlensing candidates in 1.3 million light curves from TESS Sector 61. We
find one compelling candidate associated with TIC-107150013, a source star at
d_s = 3.194 kpc. The event has a duration t_E = 0.074^+0.002_-0.002
days and shows prominent finite-source features (ρ =
4.55^+0.08_-0.07), making it consistent with an FFP in the
terrestrial-mass range. This exciting result indicates that our ongoing search
through all TESS sectors has the opportunity to shed new light on this
enigmatic population of worlds.
更多查看译文
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要