2021

In 2021, I secured Steve Bryson, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, as my mentor. Throughout the fall and winter, we had weekly meetings in which he educated me on the necessary background information to begin working. In these sessions I learned about the fundamental properties of stars and the planets that occur around them. This was necessary to understand the future work I would be doing.

2022 Spring

In 2022, I began officially working with Steve and Halle on our project. We are attempting to create an automated vetting system, similar to that of the Kepler Robovetter (see: Relevant Articles), that can distinguish TESS planet candidates from false positives like eclipsing binaries. After manually vetting our data, we are currently in the process of statistical analysis: writing a program that takes the various indicators into account and decides on a label. This is a small scale model of a larger term project, essentially proving a more complete version is possible.

2022 Fall

Steve and I have determined the direction for our work this year: we will be examining the RUWE indicator within GAIA data to analyze the validity of current confirmed planets and planet candidates. This is similar to our work from last year, working with indicators and their relevance to telescope data. However, this year there are some key differences: we are working with the GAIA telescope rather than TESS, we are focusing on a specific indicator (RUWE) and its significance, and our work is not a "stepping stone" for a larger goal; we are seeking to identify a potentially major flaw in data seen as concrete.

2023

Steve and I are making good progress on the project with the newest addition to our team, Nate Maretzki. We are working with probabilities of planets and eclipsing binaries, and hopefully using RUWE to do so.

Spring 2023

Steve, Nate, and I recently finished manually examining all KOIs with a new false positive probability above 1%, and are moving into TRICERATOPS vetting.

Spring 2023

We have finished running TRICERATOPS and are beginning to write for publication.