ES-03-0045

The TESS Mission Reaches for Cooler Planets

Diana Dragomir, Karen Collins, Paul Dalba, Arvind Gupta, Mallory Harris, Christopher Mann, Ismael Mireles, Hugh Osborn, Sam Quinn, Solene Ulmer-Moll, Steven Villanueva Jr.

While the observing strategy of NASA’s TESS mission was initially biased towards primarily finding short-period planets, now that we are at more than four years of observations, TESS-discovered exoplanets with period in the tens or hundreds of days are being confirmed at an accelerating pace. A major advantage of TESS over Kepler is the much larger number of stars observed, and the brightness of many of those stars, which uniquely enable mass determination, detailed orbit characterization, and eventual atmospheric characterization of their transiting planets.

In this poster, I will describe how the TESS Single Transit Planet Candidate Working Group searches for long-period planet candidates in TESS observations, and how we validate or confirm those that are true planets. I will give an update on and discuss the current yield of our search as a function of planet radius, period and host star mass. I will highlight a few validated or confirmed systems of interest, including: a multi-planet system that includes the longest-period (483 days) TESS planet found to date; a multi-planet system that includes a cold sub-Neptune orbiting an M1 dwarf with a period of 84 days; and several P>50-day planets for which we already have mass and orbit RV measurements.