Exovetter: A Vetting Metrics Framework for Transiting Exoplanets

Exovetter is a Python package which unifies multiple exoplanet transit vetting algorithms into one pip-installable distribution. Transit signal vetting has been used as part of the TESS, Kepler, and K2 survey missions to create catalogs of transiting exoplanets. Metrics are calculated from the photometric and pixel-level time series as a way to distinguish between true transit signals and false positive signals caused by stellar variability and noise. The Exovetter package presented here builds on the heritage of the vetting tools developed for the Kepler mission but uses a standardized framework for all the algorithms, utilizing astropy units and the lightkurve package. Exovetter can be used for simple visualizations and to create customizable vetting pipelines regardless of which time series photometry is being used. Such a framework will easily be extendible to include metrics needed for future transit searches of high-cadence photometry from any mission, such as those expected for the Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey. Here we demonstrate the functionality of exovetter by creating a simple pipeline and vetting a catalog of known planets and false positives found with TESS. Additionally, we provide several instructional Jupyter notebooks explaining each vetter and its use. The package is open source and we actively encourage community improvements and contributions of new vetters.