Who wants to look at sexy figures that prove this dip is not, in fact, a transiting circumbinary exoplanet and is just the telescope being a bit drunk?
Fig. 1 - Detrending the raw data from the TESS telescope. This removes instrumentation artifacts. The big dip on the left side of the graph is a primary eclipse in which the secondary (smaller/dimmer star) passes in front of the primary star (larger/brighter star) in an eclipsing binary star system (i.e. it has two stars instead of one, and they orbit around each other).
Fig 2: Detrended graph looking at the region to prove instrumentational artifacts were removed
Fig. 3: A look at the mysterious dip in question that we are trying to see if it could be a planet passing in front of one of the stars (it's not)
Fig 4. Looking at the light curve (top) and then the centroids of how the pixels of the star system moved on the telescope's camera. If this was actually a planet, we would expect the centroid to be constant throughout.
Fig 5. A closer look around the dip in question. The centroid itself mimics the dip, proving this is an instrumentational artifact from TESS being a bit drunk (and we love her for it).
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this science break.
