DIAmante TESS AutoRegressive Planet Search (DTARPS): II. Hundreds of New TESS Candidate Exoplanets

Abstract

The DIAmante TESS AutoRegressive Planet Search (DTARPS) project seeks to identify photometric transiting planets from 976,814 southern hemisphere stars observed in Year 1 of the TESS mission. This paper follows the methodology developed by Melton et al. (Paper I) using light curves extracted and pre-processed by the DIAmante project (Montalto et al. 2020). Paper I emerged with a list of 7,377 light curves with statistical properties characteristic of transiting planets but dominated by False Alarms and False Positives. Here a multistage vetting procedure is applied including: centroid motion and crowding metrics, False Alarm and False Positive reduction, photometric binary elimination, and ephemeris match removal. The vetting produces a catalog of 462 DTARPS Candidates across the southern ecliptic hemisphere and 310 objects in a spatially incomplete Galactic Plane list. Fifty-eight percent were not previously identified as transiting systems. Candidates are flagged for possible blending from nearby stars based on Zwicky Transient Facility data and for possible radial velocity variations based on Gaia satellite data. Orbital periods and planetary radii are refined using astrophysical modeling; the resulting parameters closely match published values for Confirmed Planets. Their properties are discussed in Paper III.