Discovering exoplanets in Pleiades with transiting exoplanet survey satellite

Abstract

No transiting exoplanets have previously been found in the Pleiades. The Pleiades is a relatively young star cluster near us, which makes it valuable for investigation. This study aims to determine the existence of exoplanets in Pleiades using the transit method. Specifically, it sought to determine if the listed 83 stars have exoplanets by inspecting on light-curves from data of Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The TESS mission, with a better resolution and observed sky area than the previous Kepler mission, aimed to find more exoplanets around stars. To test the hypothesis that exoplanets do exist in the 83 stars of the Pleiades, we downloaded their light-curves using Jupyter notebook and the Lightkurve package, then checked using BLS method and fitting if there were transits. The results showed no clear sign of transiting planets in those stars. These results suggest that the 83 stars checked likely dont have a transiting exoplanet, but 83 stars cannot represent the whole Pleiades star cluster. Other methods should be used in analysis to gain more accurate results and more stars should be checked to investigate whether or not transiting exoplanets exist in the Pleiades star cluster.