I know, right...!?

We are currently working with a Masters student, Jerry Cao, to test whether expanding the range of durations searched helps find more real transits and whether that's outweighed by an increase in the rate of spurious detection or not. Jerry is great and applying for astro phds right now BTW...

Is the lack of detections (black points) outside the red box real, or a selection effect? We won't know until we search for them

The green shaded area in figure shows the range of durations where transits could exist, when non-zero impact parameters and eccentricities are accounted for. The red line encloses the usual range searched.

We tried to post it on arXiv, but they declined - even after we appealed, apparently because it was "not of plausible interest for inclusion within arXiv". We are baffled and hugely disappointed by this decision, which makes absolutely no sense to us.

...But what we care about here is correcting the radial velocity signatures of active regions to improve sensitivity to exoplanets, and for that it works surprisingly well. Check out @astroklein.bsky.social's thread for more details

...Indeed, we only recover a very low-resolution representation of the stellar surface, though it's interesting that this is even possible for such a slowly spinning star...

signed and shared!