Of 149 TESS sector 1 candidate TICs, 95 look like eclipsing binaries and 37 like offset sources; none was promoted to planet candidate

Summary

The goal was to vet only the TICs in candidates_ranked.csv, which contains 149 unique stars (259 rows). Three confirmed-planet controls were added. The vetting kit gave no star the planet_candidate verdict. The verdicts were eclipsing_binary 95, offset_source 37, needs_review 14, known_planet 3 (the controls) and inconclusive 3. The 14 needs_review stars remain unresolved, and none is confirmed. Everything here is exploratory. The Gaia false-positive pass and the catalogue cross-match did not deliver results.

What was analyzed

• Input: tables/candidates_ranked.csv, 259 rows, collapsed to 149 unique TICs (110 duplicate detections). All 149 have period, t0 and depth. All 149 have SPOC 2-min data (median 6 sectors per star).
• Controls: 3 confirmed planets chosen in code from pscomppars: TIC 166778944, 470171739 and 353475866. An earlier set of controls chosen from memory was dropped.
• Vetting kit run: 152 stars (149 + 3), 16 of 16 shards succeeded, none lost.
• Other-sector replication: 152 stars. Light curves were 139 SPOC 2-min, 12 TESS-SPOC FFI and 1 QLP. Sector 1 was excluded.
• Common-mode systematics test: 149 candidates.
• Compute: 148 runs, 99 succeeded, 19.5 CPU hours, 108 of 120 minutes, 4 work groups done and 1 dropped.

Key results

All results are exploratory. Full table: tables/vetting_results_final.csv (group 3, merge 5301b5ce).

• Verdicts for 152 stars: eclipsing_binary 95, offset_source 37, needs_review 14, known_planet 3, inconclusive 3.
• Controls: all 3 received known_planet and matched TOI-4153 b, TOI-1693 b and TOI-4662 b. They are not candidates.
• Needs-review stars:

Every one of the 14 fails at least one test, so none is a clean survivor. Periods near 13.85 d with only 2 transits are suspicious.

• Systematics (job bbac492b): 18.1% of candidate periods lie near the 13.7 d TESS orbit or its half or third, against a null mean of 4.7% (p = 0.0005). Pairs of stars with t0 within 0.05 d number 550 against a null mean of 80.8 (p = 0.002). The t0 null is crude. This points to instrumental systematics in part of the list, and it matches the 13.85 d cluster above. 30 candidates were flagged.
• Other-sector repeat: 128 of 149 candidates repeat, as do 3 of 3 controls. However, 4770 of 5960 null folds also exceed SNR 7, so this test barely discriminates. The per-star p ≤ 0.05 count is 47 of 149 (controls 3 of 3).
• Claim status: "95 of 152 are eclipsing binaries" is at level candidate, novelty known. The reviewer returned inconclusive, with no verdict. No preregistered hypotheses were run and there is no leaderboard.

Alternatives explored

These directions went beyond the request.

• Other-sector replication: completed, but weakly informative because of the high null rate.
• Systematics test: partial, and it found orbit-harmonic clustering.
• Gaia DR3 false-positive pass (RUWE, neighbours, giant host, companion radius): unfinished, so no flag rates exist.

What did not work

• The other-sector repeat test does not separate real signals from random folds, since most null folds pass SNR > 7.
• The Gaia false-positive flags (giant host, RUWE, bright neighbours, companion radius, duration vs density) stayed untested, as did the TOI and NASA archive cross-match for the 14 stars.

Confidence and limitations

Confidence is moderate for the broad conclusion that most of the list is false positives, and low for the status of any individual star. The verdicts come from a single automated kit with no independent check. The 14 needs_review stars need photometric follow-up and, ultimately, spectroscopic follow-up (radial velocity, high-resolution imaging) before any is called a planet.

Next steps

• Run the Gaia DR3 checks (RUWE, neighbours, stellar radius) on the 14 needs_review stars.
• Cross-match those 14 against TOI and the NASA archive.
• Inspect pixel-level data and individual transits for the stars with long periods and few transits, to test for the 13.7 d orbit systematics.
• Check the short-period stars with many transits (TIC 197733707, 79247714, 80056984, 350431472, 179120455) for background binaries via difference imaging.
• Fit transit models to any survivor.