Abstract

NASA's TESS mission has produced more than 5000 planet candidates to date, and the TESS community has thoroughly surpassed the mission's level one science requirement of delivering masses for 50 new, small, TOI planets. With such a large starting pool, however, deciding which candidates to follow up next requires the collaboration of numerous ground based facilities. I will discuss the flow down from TESS Object of Interest (TOI) to confirmed planet through the lens of two recent confirmations. TOI-824 b, is a hot, sub-Neptune planet orbiting a K4V star that sits in a crowded section of the night sky. Follow up efforts revealed an incorrect initial TESS radius estimate due to biased background estimates, demonstrating the importance of higher resolution ground based photometric follow up. TOI-1231 b, is a temperate, Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby M3V star. Exhibiting only one transit per sector of TESS monitoring, the planet is one of the coolest small planets detected in the primary mission. Models of atmospheric observations suggest that it will be possible to detect spectral features in an atmosphere similar to that of K2-18 b enabling the first comparative planetology in the 250-350 Kelvin temperature range. These new planets offer promising atmospheric follow up possibilities from the ground and from space, and make up a small but exciting portion of TESS’s contribution to exoplanet science. I'll also show some early confirmation results for two TESS super-Earth planets from the MAROON-X spectrograph which is proving to be a competitive force in the follow up of small TESS planets orbiting cool stars