Exploiting Kepler’s Heritage: A Transfer Learning Approach for Identifying Exoplanets’ Transits in TESS Data

In the last decade, exoplanets space missions started to collect a huge amount of photometric observations, with over ∼1,000,000 new light curves generated every month from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) full-frame images alone. In order to analyze such an unprecedented volume of data, automated planet-candidate detection has become an appreciable replacement to human vetting. In this work, we present a Machine Learning approach, based on Deep Neural Networks, to perform a binary classification of TESS light curves in terms of planet candidate and not-planet. Since few TESS labeled data exist to date, we pre-train the network with Kepler DR24 data set, including ≳15,000 labeled light curves. Our pre-trained model is then tested on ExoFOP data, showing an appreciable gain in terms of reliability with respect to a randomly initialized model.