ES-03-0022

Widening the circle: Finding outlying planets around low-mass stars

Mallory Harris, Diana Dragomir, Steven Villanueva

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is optimized to search M dwarf stars in the solar neighborhood for transiting extrasolar planets. By focusing on these small, cool stars and observing the whole sky, TESS presents an opportunity to study the demographics of planets in these systems, even out to previously unexplored regions of parameter space. Using TESS data, I am conducting a survey of an unseen population of cold planets orbiting low-mass stars to calculate their occurrence rates and to provide targets for future characterization. To date, only ~10 such M dwarf orbiting planets have been discovered at distances greater than 0.2 AU from their host stars. These planets and their demographics, however, could provide new insight into theories of planet formation and migration around cool stars. To identify these planets in the TESS data, I am developing a pipeline capable of detecting both single- and multiply-transiting planets using a modified version of the Transit-Least Squared algorithm and the signal-to-noise ratio of transit events. I will present on the current state of this search, as well as the discovery of a multi-planet system around low-mass stars that contains an 84-day period planet (the coldest M dwarf planet found by TESS to date) that represents the potential embodied by this search.