Discovering planets in crowded regions

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Crowded fields, where flux from multiple stellar sources falls into the same pixel region, can be difficult to search for exoplanet signals. Flux from several sources dilutes the signal from the exoplanet transit, making them harder to detect. This is particularly hard using the Simple Aperture Photometry (SAP) method typically used in Kepler analyses. Because Kepler’s original mission strategically focused on isolated stars, the K2 and TESS communities are still developing the tools and expertise required to effectively extract science from blended stars in crowded regions. Point Spread Function (PSF) fitting photometry has already been shown to be a viable route towards extracting science from K2 (Libralato et al. 2016a,b; Nardiello et al. 2016), but the technique has only been applied to a subset of K2 cluster data so far. In addition, difference imaging has been applied to the crowded K2 Campaign 9 field towards the Galactic Bulge (Wang et al. 2017) and towards the M35 cluster (Soares-Furtado et al. 2017). A comprehensive search for planets using these alternative photometry techniques may reveal new planets in such interesting regions.