Papers › Localizing Sources of Variability in Crowded TESS Photometry
Localizing Sources of Variability in Crowded TESS Photometry
Michael E. Higgins, Keaton J. Bell
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has an exceptionally large plate scale of 21"/px, causing most TESS light curves to record the blended light of multiple stars. This creates a danger of misattributing variability observed by TESS to the wrong source, which would invalidate any analysis. We develop a method that can localize the origin of variability on the sky to better than one fifth of a pixel. Given measured frequencies of observed variability (e.g., from periodogram analysis), we show that the corresponding best-fit sinusoid amplitudes to raw light curves extracted from each pixel are distributed the same as light from the variable source. The primary assumption of this method is that other nearby stars are not variable at the same frequencies. Essentially, we are using the high frequency resolution of TESS to overcome limitations from its low spatial resolution. We have implemented our method in an open source Python package, TESS Localize (github.com/Higgins00/TESS-Localize), that determines the location of a variable source on the sky given TESS pixel data and a set of observed frequencies of variability. Our method utilizes the TESS Pixel Response Function models, and we characterize systematics in the residuals of fitting these models to data. Given the ubiquity of source blending in TESS light curves, verifying the source of observed variability should be a standard step in TESS analyses.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections