Kavli Affiliate: Andrew Vanderburg
| First 5 Authors: Benjamin J. Hord, Eliza M. -R. Kempton, Thomas Mikal-Evans, David W. Latham, David R. Ciardi
| Summary:
JWST has ushered in an era of unprecedented ability to characterize
exoplanetary atmospheres. While there are over 5,000 confirmed planets, more
than 4,000 TESS planet candidates are still unconfirmed and many of the best
planets for atmospheric characterization may remain to be identified. We
present a sample of TESS planets and planet candidates that we identify as
"best-in-class" for transmission and emission spectroscopy with JWST. These
targets are sorted into bins across equilibrium temperature $T_{mathrm{eq}}$
and planetary radius $R{_mathrm{p}}$ and are ranked by transmission and
emission spectroscopy metric (TSM and ESM, respectively) within each bin. In
forming our target sample, we perform cuts for expected signal size and stellar
brightness, to remove sub-optimal targets for JWST. Of the 194 targets in the
resulting sample, 103 are unconfirmed TESS planet candidates, also known as
TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs). We perform vetting and statistical validation
analyses on these 103 targets to determine which are likely planets and which
are likely false positives, incorporating ground-based follow-up from the TESS
Follow-up Observation Program (TFOP) to aid the vetting and validation process.
We statistically validate 23 TOIs, marginally validate 33 TOIs to varying
levels of confidence, deem 29 TOIs likely false positives, and leave the
dispositions for 4 TOIs as inconclusive. 14 of the 103 TOIs were confirmed
independently over the course of our analysis. We provide our final
best-in-class sample as a community resource for future JWST proposals and
observations. We intend for this work to motivate formal confirmation and mass
measurements of each validated planet and encourage more detailed analysis of
individual targets by the community.
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