A large search of archival TESS data by the T16 project has turned up 11,554 transiting planet candidates, including 10,091 that are new to the literature, and a confirmed hot Jupiter orbiting the star TIC 183374187. The team searched stars down to T=16 magnitude in the first year (Cycle 1) of TESS observations. The candidate sample covers orbital periods from about 0.5 to 27 days and also includes 411 single-transit events for which the team did not attempt to measure an orbital period.

The work began with the T16 set of 83,717,159 light curves. These light curves come from the TESS full-frame images (FFIs), which are 30-minute stacked exposures that cover wide areas of sky. The T16 pipeline produces uniformly detrended and systematics-corrected light curves using difference imaging photometry — a method that subtracts a high-quality reference image from each exposure to isolate changes in brightness. The team then ran a semi-automated, machine-learning–assisted transit search on every Cycle 1 FFI light curve down to T=16.

To show that the search finds real planets, the authors followed up one candidate host, TIC 183374187, using radial-velocity measurements from the Planet Finder Spectrograph on the 6.5-meter Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. Those data confirmed the transit signal as a newly identified hot Jupiter orbiting a metal-poor, thick-disk star. This validation demonstrates the pipeline’s ability to discover bona fide, previously missed transiting planets in the TESS FFIs.

The result matters because it substantially increases the pool of planet candidates available for study. The authors report that their findings more than double the number of known TESS exoplanet candidates. Because the T16 sample reaches fainter stars than many previous searches, it helps fill a gap in the census of planets and gives astronomers many more targets to test how planet populations depend on stellar type, metallicity, and orbital period.