COUNTESS Delivers Uniformly Vetted TESS Northern CVZ Catalog of 125 Planets from 26,114 Stars

Hotnisky et al. applied their transit-search pipeline to TESS-SPOC light curves spanning the primary and first extended missions in the northern CVZ. They combined multi-sector photometry with heterogeneous cadences, ran fast-folding BLS detection, and performed statistical validation on a stellar sample drawn uniformly from Gaia DR3 and 2MASS. The search returned 10 new candidates with periods 1.2–34.6 days and radii 1.73–4.19 Earth radii, two of which (TIC 219893931b, TIC 237254473b) passed full validation.

This vetted catalog supplies the clean occurrence-rate baseline needed to compare TESS CVZ yields directly with Kepler and K2 demographics. Longer temporal baselines capture planets beyond the 10-day sensitivity cliff that dominates most TESS fields, reducing the period bias that has skewed prior occurrence studies. The uniform stellar parameters and consistent vetting remove the heterogeneous selection effects that plague aggregated TOI lists.

Future southern-CVZ processing and JWST/ELT target lists will test whether the sub-Neptune occurrence cliff at 10–30 days persists across stellar types. The paper’s explicit recovery fraction (115/159) and false-positive vetting criteria already allow quantitative completeness corrections that scattered press releases omit.

Next steps include injection-recovery tests on the full 391k-star parent sample and cross-matching with radial-velocity surveys to anchor mass-radius relations for the new candidates.