Accelerating Long-period Exoplanet Discovery by Combining Deep Learning and Citizen Science

Journal article

Automated planetary transit detection has become vital to identify and prioritize candidates for expert analysis and verification given the scale of modern telescopic surveys. Current methods for short-period exoplanet detection work effectively due to periodicity in the transit signals, but a robust approach for detecting single-transit events is lacking. However, volunteer-labeled transits collected by the Planet Hunters TESS (PHT) project now provide an unprecedented opportunity to investigate a data-driven approach to long-period exoplanet detection. In this work, we train a 1D convolutional neural network to classify planetary transits using PHT volunteer scores as training data. We find that this model recovers planet candidates (TESS objects of interest; TOIs) at a precision and recall rate exceeding those of volunteers, with a 20% improvement in the area under the precision-recall curve and 10% more TOIs identified in the top 500 predictions on average per sector. Importantly, the model also recovers almost all planet candidates found by volunteers but missed by current automated methods (PHT community TOIs). Finally we retrospectively utilise the model to simulate live deployment in PHT to reprioritize candidates for analysis. We also find that multiple promising planet candidates, originally missed by PHT, would have been found using our approach, showing promise for upcoming real-world deployment.

Authors: Malik, SA; Eisner, NL; Mason, IR; Platymesi, S; Aigrain, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Astronomical Society
• Journal: Astronomical Journal
• Volume: 170
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 39
• Publication date: 2025-06-19
• Acceptance date: 2025-04-17
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/add46d
• EISSN: 1538-3881
• ISSN: 0004-6256
• Language: English
• Keywords: Transit photometry; Convolutional neural networks; Exoplanet detection methods; Classification; Exoplanet astronomy