giants

An open-source Python package to search for exoplanets around evolved stars.

The 'giants' pipeline can be used for the following:

• Downloading TESS Full-Frame Image (FFI) observations from MAST
• De-trending TESS scattered light background with the lightkurve RegressionCorrector
• Performing a transit search with a Box-Least Squares analysis
• Analyzing stellar variability and oscillations with a Lomb-Scargle periodogram
• Generating summary and vetting plots for visual inspection of planet candidates

While the de-trending is optimized to preserve the long-duration, low-SNR transits characteristic of planets orbiting evolved (subgiant and red giant) stars, the pipeline can be run on any target with a TIC ID. Also included in the code are scripts to prepare input files for large-scale batch parallel batch runs (with GNU parallel or slurm arrays) on high-performance computing clusters. 

A simple example is shown below.

import giants
target = giants.Target(ticid=176956893)
target.fetch_and_clean_data(sectors=[1,2])
target.create_summary_plot()

The 'giants' pipeline is currently under development, and some functionality may be limited. This fixed version of the software was used to perform the transit search for publications in the "TESS Giants Transiting Giants" series through paper VII (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11037). An up-to-date version of the code can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/nksaunders/giants).