TOI Release Notes

The TOI Catalog is hosted by MIT on the TESS Exoplanet Vetter platform, tev.mit.edu: Click here to go to the TOI Portal (Recommended browser: Firefox or Chrome)

The TOI table can be sorted using the arrows to the right of each column heading and can be filtered using the text boxes at the bottom of each column.

More information on each target is available via the hyperlink in the “Source Pipeline” column.

Download the TOI Catalog as a CSV

To download a CSV file of the table:

• Click on the green “CSV” button in the upper left-hand corner and select “TOI Lis from the drop-down.
• When CSV is generated, depending on browser settings, a pop-up will ask to either save or open the file.
• To download a CSV file with additional information, select the “TOI+” option in the drop-down menu.

The CSV download does not save filtered or sorted row selections.

TEV API

API is TBD (as of 12/23/20)

wget is possible with a TEV account, which provides a permakey for download.

Contact tev-admin at mit dot edu for more details.

Using the TOI Releases and TESS Data

All users of TESS data are encouraged to follow the best practices underlined in the TESS publication policy. All members of the TESS Team (Co-I, Collaborator, WG member, TESS staff) follow the TESS publication policy.

Learn more about the TESS publication policy

If users are creating a publication, they should include whichever of the below is most appropriate in the acknowledgements.

Publications based on data obtained from the TESS project are requested to include the acknowledgment:

“Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission directorate.”

Once the TOI Releases are public:

“We acknowledge the use of public TOI Release data from pipelines at the TESS Science Office and at the TESS Science Processing Operations Center.”

Once the data are public on MAST:

This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST).”

Creation of TOIs

The TOIs come from visual analysis of significant threshold crossing events by the TSO. These events were found by the TESS SPOC pipeline of record and the TESS Science Office Quick Look Pipeline (QLP). For in-depth description of the TOI process, see Guerrero et al, 2021.

The TESS team has developed a process for community TOIs (cTOIs). These cTOIs will be from the FFIs, and not from the SPOC data products. MIT’s Quick Look Pipeline (QLP) is one source of cTOIs. See this page for more on submitting your own cTOIs.

Further notes on displayed columns

No.        Name                            Notes

1        Parameter Source Pipeline       Pipeline supplying the current parameters for target, either SPOC or internal TSO pipeline, QLP (Quick Look Pipeline)

2           Detection Pipeline(s)           Pipeline(s) that detected the TOI in the sector in which it was alerted. Here, “detection” is defined as a transit signal passing automated triage (TEC for SPOC signals or Astronet for QLP signals) followed by review by the TOI Vetting Team in which the signal is determined a likely planet candidate ready to alert as a TOI. Possible values: SPOC (detected by the SPOC pipeline), QLP (detected by the QLP pipeline), SPOC/QLP (detected by both SPOC and QLP), CTOI (the TOI was the result of a community submission or request for a TOI number), or UNKNOWN (the detection source of the TOI is unknown or ambiguous. This is for older TOIs that could not be confidently dispositioned.)

3                   TIC                  A unique identifier for every object in the TIC. The ID is unique and permanent. If an object is removed from the TIC in later versions, a new object is removed from the TIC in later versions. A new object will never inherit an old ID.

4               TOI ID                 TESS Object of Interest identifier.

5          Disposition             Disposition. “PC” means planet candidate.

6                  RA                    Right Ascension (deg) (JD2000 if from SPOC, JD2015 if from MIT QLP)

7                 Dec                   Declination (deg) (JD2000 if from SPOC, JD2015 if from MIT QLP)

8                Tmag                TESS magnitudes computed by relations described by Stassun+ 2017.

9               Epoch                Barycentric-corrected epoch of first transit in TESS Julian Days (BJD – 2457000).

10             Period               Planet candidate orbital period, in days.

11           Duration             Planet candidate transit duration, in hours.

12        Transit Depth        Planet candidate transit depth, in parts per million.

13            Sectors              List of sectors contributing data to TOI parameters

14          Comment            Comments from TOI group vetting. Can be blank

15          # planets             Number of planets in TOI system

16              Rstar                Stellar radius of host star

17            Rplanet              Planet candidate radius in Earth radii. NaN if stellar radius is not in TIC.

18              Teq                   Planet equilibrium temperature

19              Teff                   Effective temperature

20         Stellar flux            Effective stellar flux value

21              SNR                  Signal-to-noise of transit (SNR = 1000 to flag low-SNR TOIs, see note below)

22    Centroid offset Flag    “TRUE” if the target centroid is offset from the target position

23-29        TFOP                 Initial priority for TFOP working group follow-up. Updated TFOP priorities can be found on ExoFOP.

30            Alerted              Date TOI was first alerted

31           Updated             Date TOI parameters relevant to follow-up were updated (TOI ID, epoch, period, period uncertainty, transit depth, sectors, Rp, or Rstar). NOTE: this has changed from the ‘Edited’ field, which marked when ANY TOI parameter was updated.

The displayed columns are inherited from SPOC if their values are available. Otherwise, they come from MIT’s QLP.

Note that for TOIs which have only been observed in S1-S12 with no additional extended mission observations, the QLP includes stellar parameters from Gaia release DR2 whereas the SPOC stellar parameters are taken from the TICv8. QLP switched to TICv8 in S12 and SPOC in S14.

Note on SNR: Some TOIs have been reprocessed with the QLP to combine prime mission and extended mission observations (e.g. Year 1 + Year 3). QLP nominally discards TCEs with SNR <= 6, so the SNR is hard-coded to SNR = 1000 in these cases to pass the TCE along in the pipeline.

For TIC7 positions, see their epoch exceptions. For further information about the TIC, see Stassun et al. 2017 or the TIC release notes maintained by Ryan Oelkers.

Most questions about the nature of the SPOC data validation reports will be answered in the TESS data product summary: https://archive.stsci.edu/tess/all_products.html.

Last updated 11-12-2021