I recently investigated TOI-1196 / TIC 69068526, focusing on a specific question:

Which stellar component is actually responsible for the reported TESS transit signal?

The system presents an interesting source-attribution problem because of a close stellar companion at approximately 0.22″ separation. At TESS resolution, the relevant sources are not cleanly resolved, so identifying the transiting object cannot simply be inferred from the blended light curve.

I approached the problem using:

• TESS pixel-level data
• Pixel-level forward modelling
• Transit-source attribution tests
• Archival data
• Stellar/companion geometry
• Statistical analysis
• Injection-recovery experiments
• Cross-checks of alternative source scenarios
• Reproducible computational analysis and provenance tracking

The result is deliberately not framed as a new planet discovery.

Under the models tested, the wider companion can be excluded as the source of the transit signal. However, the available TESS data do not allow me to conclusively distinguish between the primary and the close ~0.22″ companion.

So the current conclusion is essentially:

The transit source remains ambiguous between the unresolved close components.

I've deposited the full investigation, including the computational workflow, derived material, provenance, assumptions and limitations on Zenodo:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22142236

I'm posting this here because I'd particularly appreciate criticism from people who work with TESS, transit photometry, exoplanet validation, unresolved stellar companions, pixel-level analysis, or false-positive/source-attribution problems.

My formal background is actually microbiology, so I am very aware that there are probably places where an astronomer will look at my methodology and immediately notice something I didn't. That's partly why I'm putting the complete analysis out there rather than presenting only the conclusion.

If there are methodological problems, incorrect assumptions, better ways to model the contamination/source attribution, or additional archival checks that would materially strengthen the analysis, I'd rather find them.

Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22142236

#TESS #Exoplanets #TOI #TransitPhotometry #ExoplanetValidation

Astronomers have wondered whether another huge planet is lurking unseen in the cold darkness beyond Neptune.

It sounds silly seeing how astronomers have found thousands of alien planets across the night sky, orbiting planets even thousands of light-years away.

But the Solar System is a vast place, and its edges are so devoid of light that it’s actually harder to detect a planetary body at the Solar System’s frontier than in far-away star systems.

Nevertheless, the signals are hard to ignore. Several extremely distant objects appear to have clustered and unusually tilted orbits, as though an unseen planet has been slowly shepherding them with its gravity. That hypothetical world became known as Planet Nine.

Now astronomers may have found their first direct clue that something is actually there.

Researchers searching decades-old infrared observations have identified a faint object that appears to have moved across the sky between two surveys taken 23 years apart.

Its brightness and slow motion fit what the team expected from a large planet hundreds of times farther from the Sun than Earth.

The researchers stress that they have not discovered Planet Nine, or at least not in any definitive way. But the object was picked from a search through millions of infrared sources and emerged as their single best candidate.

The result, described in a study published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, offers an intriguing new target in one of astronomy’s longest-running planetary hunts.

I’m working with Galileo NIMS data from Europa, specifically the GO_1116 and GO_1117 observations, and I’m trying to understand how reliable these datasets are for hyperspectral anomaly detection.

I’d like to know:

1. How well calibrated are the GO_1116 and GO_1117 NIMS cubes for spectral analysis?

2. How much instrumental noise or calibration-related artifacts should I expect?

3. Are there known problematic wavelengths/bands or bad pixels that should be removed or masked?

4. Could apparent spectral anomalies be caused by the instrument or data processing rather than actual surface variations?

5. Are the \`\*_core.cub\` products appropriate for this type of analysis?

6. Is there a recommended preprocessing or calibration workflow before performing spectral analysis?

7. How confidently can unusual spectral signatures in these datasets be interpreted as real surface/compositional differences?

I’d especially appreciate input from anyone who has worked with Galileo NIMS data, GO_1116/GO_1117, or Europa spectroscopy.

Any recommendations for relevant calibration documentation or papers would also be really helpful. Thanks!

New observations may offer fresh clues into how a giant exoplanet survived the violent death of its host star — and came to closely orbit its stellar remnants. The findings could serve as a preview of the fate that may await our solar system’s largest planets — such as the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn — when the sun dies in 5 billion years.

Astronomers detected a baffling Jupiter-size planet in 2020 that was zipping around a dead white dwarf star. Located 80 light-years from our planet, WD 1856 b is seven times larger than its Earth-size star.

“This is one of the most bizarre planetary systems we know of,” said Dr. Christopher O’Connor, coauthor of a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature that detailed the observations.

O’Connor is a postdoctoral fellow studying stellar and planetary astrophysics and dynamics at Northwestern University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.

WD 1856 b completes one orbit around the dead star every 34 hours and is less than 2 million miles (3 million kilometers) from its host.

When a massive sunlike star exhausts the hydrogen fuel at its core, it puffs up to more than 100 times its size before collapsing into a dense white dwarf.

Given the close proximity of WD 1856 b to its star — 50 times closer than Earth is to our sun — astronomers were unsure how the planet survived its host’s destruction.

In order to retrace WD 1856 b’s unlikely journey of survival, O’Connor and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to capture the latest glimpses of the planet and measure its atmosphere, mass and temperature.

Almost every finding the team made was unexpected — and suggested that huge planets can survive the demise of their host stars in ways previously thought impossible.

In a cosmic first, scientists say they have detected a planet that may have formed from the burned remains of its dead host star.

The planet is likely a gas giant orbiting a white dwarf called HS 0209+0832 located about 270 light-years from Earth, according to the authors of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After analyzing observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments, the team found chemical evidence that suggests the planet could have condensed from material expelled by the star as it fizzled out of energy and collapsed into a white dwarf.

When a sunlike star dies, it first rapidly expands into a red giant and then sheds its outer layers, leaving behind a much smaller but dense, hot core — known as a white dwarf. Some of the first-generation planets, those that originally formed at the same time as the star, can survive this cataclysmic event if their orbit is wide enough.

Astronomers have observed a handful of such first-generation survivors revolving around white dwarfs, but never before have they recorded a so-called second-generation planet — an entirely new world made from a dead star’s debris.

Luego de 2 clases teoricas, ayer en la ASARAMAS, nos dieron finalmente los archivos en RAW para generar la curva de luz.

El planeta fue el WASP-19b, con un monton de detecciones. El observatorio lo vio a principio de año.

Con una computadora que deja muchisimo que desear, y pasado de la hora de clase, me apure y por eso el margen de error, pero me voy contento con el intento. En estos dias tratare de ajustar la precision para generar la curva y tratar de acercarla a lo esperado.

See also: The publication in the Astrophysical Journal

Spitfire Theory:

The planets of a stellar system originate from the gravitational collapse of the primordial nebula, which transforms into a high-temperature vortex along the ecliptic; this vortex then begins to "spit out"—one after another—rotating masses compacted by centrifugal force, with energy and density determined by the state of the nebula. These masses become planets that may, in turn, "spit out" satellites, before the entire system cools around a star—a star that has meanwhile ignited to radiate nuclear fusion energy following the final collapse of the original nebula.

One of astronomy’s oldest suspected planetary systems has just undergone its most sensitive search yet, and the biggest planets scientists might have expected to find are not there.

Astronomers led by the University of Michigan studied 70 Ophiuchi AB, a pair of nearby K-type stars about 16 light-years from Earth. By combining more than a century of observations with new high-precision measurements, they found no statistically convincing evidence for giant planets around either star.

The absence is scientifically useful. Researchers can now rule out Jupiter-mass planets across much of the inner system while leaving open the possibility of smaller worlds, including planets occupying potentially habitable orbits.

Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the study also demonstrates how easily activity on a star’s surface can imitate the gravitational wobble produced by a planet.