{"id":"05b964ab-5388-48bf-b06a-b4c274ef5eea","arxiv_id":"2607.19756","paper_version":1,"verdict":"CONDITIONAL","confidence":"MODERATE","novelty_score":5.0,"correctness_risk":"medium","formal_verification":"none","parameter_count":4,"one_line_summary":"Follow-up of seven TESS hot-Jupiter candidates confirms five new planets (TOI-603 b, TOI-2114 b, TOI-4492 b, TOI-5806 b, TOI-5811 B b), one false positive (TOI-1837), and one inconclusive case (TOI-1137).","lead":"The paper reports radial-velocity follow-up of seven TESS hot-Jupiter candidates, confirming five new planets and identifying one candidate as an eclipsing binary. It matters because it adds rare bright-host hot Jupiters, including four strong targets for JWST atmospheric studies and a super-Neptune in the sparsely populated 'Neptune savanna.'","discovery_kind":"extension","skeptic_critique":{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","headline":"TOI-2114 b's 7.2σ mass and ΔlnZ=+16.3 may be inflated by tight TESS ephemeris priors; RV data alone are admittedly insufficient, so a rerun with uninformative priors is needed.","rationale":"The reader's weakest assumption correctly identifies the most load-bearing vulnerability: TOI-2114 b's confirmation depends on Gaussian priors from the TESS ephemeris because the RVs alone are admittedly insufficient (§5.4). The reported evidence and mass significance are computed under those priors, and the general statement in §4.2 that uninformative priors give nearly unchanged results is not backed by a specific test for this target. This is a correctness risk, not merely a reproducibility issue, because if the significance collapses under uniform priors, one of the five claimed planets fails GP1. The other four planets have much stronger RV signals (e.g., TOI-4492 K≈713 m/s, TOI-5806 K≈237 m/s) and do not share this weakness, so the paper's broader contribution would survive even if TOI-2114 b were downgraded. The paper also provides good ancillary evidence: high-resolution imaging rules out blends for TOI-2114, and ground-based photometry shows achromatic transits on target; thus the concern is specifically about the statistical significance, not the transit origin. Other issues (missing data, a missing reference, mass-table inconsistencies) are real but do not threaten the central confirmation as directly. The proposed test—rerunning with uniform ephemeris priors and a scrambling control—would decisively settle whether the 7.2σ claim is an artifact. Until then, the conditional verdict is appropriate.","tokens_in":40198,"tokens_out":11989,"duration_ms":123889,"concrete_test":"Re-run the TOI-2114 RV-only and joint RV+photometry analyses with uniform priors on P and T0 (e.g., P uniform over [5.5, 7.0] d, T0 uniform over a 1-day window) and recompute ΔlnZ(1p vs 0p) and the posterior mass significance. If ΔlnZ drops below +6 and/or the mass significance drops below 3σ, the confirmation is not robust and the paper must either qualify TOI-2114 b's status or obtain more RVs. As a cross-check, scramble the RV time series (or shift the ephemeris phase by 0.5) and measure how often the same pipeline yields ΔlnZ>6 or mass significance >3σ.","verdict_should_be":"UNCHANGED","load_bearing_attack":"The central claim is the confirmation of five planets, and TOI-2114 b is the one the authors themselves flag as having RVs insufficient for an independent detection (§5.4). Yet the reported significance (7.2σ mass; ΔlnZ 1p−0p = +16.3) is computed with Gaussian priors on P and T0 inherited from the TESS ephemeris (Table D.4: G(6.2099619, 0.00006), G(60476.661598, 0.009895)). Because the null model has no periodic component, tight priors shrink the prior volume of the planet model and can inflate the Bayes factor; the RV signal is never tested against a model that must find its own period and phase. The authors claim in §4.2 that 'more uninformative priors give nearly unchanged results', but this is not demonstrated for TOI-2114 and appears to conflict with the §5.4 caveat. If the TESS ephemeris is slightly biased or the noise realization at the forced period is favorable, the 7.2σ mass significance could be spurious, and GP1 would not be met. This is load-bearing because TOI-2114 b is one of the five headline confirmations; if its confirmation fails, the paper's central claim is unsupported.","agreement_with_reader":"agree"},"referee_report":{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","summary":"This paper presents a ground-based follow-up campaign of seven TESS hot-Jupiter candidates using CAFE2 radial velocities, supplemented by data from other spectrographs, high-resolution imaging, and ground-based photometry. The authors jointly model TESS photometry and RVs for each target, evaluate Bayesian evidence, and assess confirmation against the proposed Exoplanet Confirmation Protocol GP1–GP3. They confirm five planets (TOI-603 b, TOI-2114 b, TOI-4492 b, TOI-5806 b, TOI-5811 B b), identify TOI-1837.01 as an eclipsing binary, and leave TOI-1137.01 inconclusive. The paper is well structured and includes extensive ancillary observations, which are used to establish the origin of the transit signals.","tokens_in":40553,"tokens_out":4498,"duration_ms":43337,"significance":"If correct, the paper adds five transiting planets with measured masses, including a super-Neptune in the 'Neptune savanna' and a high-density hot Jupiter. The multi-instrument RV dataset, high-resolution imaging, centroid analysis, and ground-based photometry are clear strengths; the Bayesian model comparison thresholds are stated explicitly. The main risk is TOI-2114 b, where the RVs are admittedly insufficient for an independent detection and the confirmation rests on priors inherited from the TESS ephemeris. There are also internal mass inconsistencies for TOI-5806 b and TOI-603 b. These issues are fixable, but they need to be resolved before the central confirmation claim can be fully trusted.","major_comments":[{"comment":"The confirmation of TOI-2114 b is not robustly demonstrated because the prior choice is internally contradictory. §5.4 states that the joint modeling uses 'broad uninformative priors on the period and ephemeris', but Table D.4 lists Gaussian priors G(6.2099619,0.00006) and G(60476.661598,0.009895) for P and T0. §4.2 asserts that more uninformative priors give nearly unchanged results, but no such test is shown for TOI-2114. Since §5.4 explicitly admits that the RV data are insufficient for an independent detection, the RV-only ΔlnZ=+16.3 and the reported 7.2σ mass significance may be inflated by the tight TESS ephemeris priors. This is load-bearing because TOI-2114 b is one of the five headline confirmations. Please provide an analysis with truly uninformative priors (or a quantitative prior-sensitivity test) to demonstrate that GP1 is satisfied.","section":null},{"comment":"The mass of TOI-5806 b is inconsistent within the paper. §5.6 reports mp=2.27+0.26−0.25 MJup in the joint-analysis summary and Table D.4 lists this value, but the same section later invokes mp=2.77+0.34−0.32 MJup for GP3, and the abstract quotes 2.77+0.34−0.32 MJup. Please harmonize the reported value and clarify which model or parameterization produced each. This is not a typographical issue because the mass underpins the GP3 confirmation and the planet's physical characterization.","section":null},{"comment":"The mass of TOI-603 b is quoted as 35.7+6.5−6.5 M⊕ in §5.1, while Table D.4 and the abstract give 33.0+6.5−6.2 M⊕. This discrepancy affects the reported mass and the 'Neptune savanna' classification. Please correct the inconsistent reporting and clearly state the final adopted mass.","section":null}],"minor_comments":[{"comment":"The number of TRES observations of TOI-603 is described as 'six visits' in the text but listed as '4 (TRES)' in Table D.1. Please harmonize these numbers for reproducibility.","section":null},{"comment":"Typo: 'unin formative' should be 'uninformative'.","section":null},{"comment":"The Pearson correlation coefficient and p-value for FWHM versus RVs are reported. Please clarify which dataset and which pair of quantities the p-value refers to, since the sentence structure is ambiguous.","section":null},{"comment":"The Exoplanet Confirmation Protocol is referenced as 'Lillo-Box et al., in prep.' and used to define GP1–GP3. Since this document is not yet available, please state the criteria explicitly in this paper as a working definition, or cite a published source, to avoid reliance on an unpublished document.","section":null},{"comment":"The sentence beginning 'The four candidates span...' appears to refer to more than four objects; please adjust to 'The five confirmed planets' or 'The four hot Jupiters' as appropriate.","section":null}],"recommendation":"major_revision","confidential_remarks":"The manuscript is well-suited to A&A and the observational effort is substantial. The central issue is that the TOI-2114 b confirmation, one of the five headline results, relies on a prior choice that is described inconsistently and is not stress-tested. The internal mass discrepancies for TOI-5806 b and TOI-603 b also need to be resolved. I do not see evidence of circularity beyond the reliance on the TESS ephemeris, which is an external constraint; the concern is purely about the sensitivity of the claimed significance to prior width. A revised version with an explicit uninformative-prior test for TOI-2114 b and harmonized mass tables would make the paper publishable."},"author_rebuttal":null,"desk_editor":{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","letter":"This is a straightforward TESS follow-up confirmation paper and it does its job. Five new transiting planets around bright stars, four of them with TSM above 90, one (TOI-5811 B b) in a hierarchical triple, one (TOI-2114 b) with a surprisingly high eccentricity, plus a clean false positive (TOI-1837) and an honest inconclusive case. The methods are standard: joint RV+transit fits, high-resolution imaging, centroid analysis, Bayesian evidence with clearly stated thresholds. The false-positive vetting is thorough, especially the contamination analysis and the way they chased the TOI-5811 signal to the bound companion. For the exoplanet community this is a useful, citable contribution.\n\nNow the soft spots, in proportion. The internal mass inconsistencies are real and need reconciliation before publication: TOI-5806 b is quoted as 2.27±0.26 MJup in §5.6 but 2.77±0.34 in the abstract and Table D.4; TOI-603 b is 35.7+6.5−6.5 M⊕ in §5.1 but 33.0+6.5−6.2 in the abstract. These are likely just different model choices (GP vs no GP, circular vs eccentric), but the paper should say so explicitly. The missing CDS link placeholder and the cite-to-Dressing-submitted that is absent from the reference list are sloppy but minor. The bigger issue is that the HIRES RVs for TOI-603 are not public; a confirmation paper should put its data on the table.\n\nOn TOI-2114 b: the stress-test worry is legitimate for the RV-only evidence. The ΔlnZ=+16.3 and the 7.2σ mass in the joint fit do rely on the transit ephemeris to define the period and phase, and the RV data alone are admittedly insufficient. But the paper states that the joint modeling uses broad uninformative priors on P and T0, and the transit itself is deep and unambiguous. So the planet confirmation does not rest solely on the RV significance; the transit plus the phase-locked RV signal together make a solid case. Still, the authors should show the joint-fit results with fully uninformative priors explicitly, and the high eccentricity (0.47) is only as good as the RV sampling — more data would help before anyone draws migration conclusions from it.\n\nThe central claim holds. The five planets are likely real, the masses and radii are plausible, and the astrophysical context (Neptune savanna, high-density TOI-4492 b, low-density TOI-5811 B b) is worth discussing. This deserves a serious referee; the requested revisions are mostly housekeeping and a bit more transparency on data and priors.\n\nI'd bring it to a reading group as a good example of the ECP-style confirmation workflow, and I'd cite it if I worked on hot Jupiters or TESS follow-up. Yes, send it to peer review.","headline":"A solid, workmanlike confirmation paper that delivers five new planets (four good JWST targets), with some internal inconsistencies and one planetary signal that leans on the TESS ephemeris more than I'd like.","tokens_in":41475,"tokens_out":1878,"would_cite":true,"duration_ms":22942,"reading_group":"maybe","serious_thinker":"yes","would_accept_peer_review":true},"rs_alignment":null,"lean_confirmation":null,"pith_extraction":{"msc":[],"pacs":[],"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","headline":"Five TESS giant-planet candidates left without mass measurements are now confirmed planets, with masses measured by radial velocities and transits.","keywords":["exoplanets","hot Jupiters","radial velocity","TESS","planet confirmation","transiting planets","Neptune savanna","stellar companions"],"falsifier":"A decisive test is to gather enough high-precision radial velocities of TOI-2114 to detect the roughly 96 m/s Keplerian signal without imposing the transit-derived period and phase. If the signal is not recovered, or if deep speckle imaging reveals a companion within about 0.1 arcseconds that could dilute the transit depth, the planet claim for TOI-2114 b fails. More broadly, comparing this paper's false-positive fraction with the full TESS hot-Jupiter candidate pool would test whether the leftover candidates are systematically more contaminated.","tokens_in":40036,"feed_emoji":"🪐","tokens_out":4596,"duration_ms":49369,"temperature":0.7,"pith_summary":"This paper reports the confirmation of five previously unconfirmed TESS planet candidates — four hot Jupiters and one super-Neptune — by measuring their masses with radial velocities and jointly modeling them with TESS photometry. The central claim is that TOI-603 b, TOI-2114 b, TOI-4492 b, TOI-5806 b, and TOI-5811 B b are genuine planets with masses ranging from 33 Earth masses to 5.9 Jupiter masses, orbiting stars bright enough for detailed follow-up. The same campaign also shows that TOI-1837.01 is an eclipsing binary rather than a planet, while TOI-1137.01 remains ambiguous. If correct, these results add five worlds to the sparsely populated hot-Jupiter census and demonstrate that a modest-size ground-based spectrograph can complete the confirmation work left undone for the more massive TESS candidates.","feed_headline":"Five TESS giant-planet candidates are now confirmed planets","feed_subtitle":"Radial velocities pin down their masses, and four are bright enough to probe atmospherically.","key_machinery":"The load-bearing tool is a joint modeling code that fits radial velocities and TESS light curves simultaneously, sampling posteriors with an affine-invariant Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampler and comparing models through Bayesian evidence. Confirmation rests on an explicit three-principle protocol: model and signal significance (at least 3 sigma and Bayesian preference over a no-planet model), demonstrated origin of the transit via high-angular-resolution imaging, centroid-shift analysis, and ground-based photometry, and planetary mass regime. For each target, high-spatial-resolution speckle and adaptive-optics imaging set the contrast limits used to exclude blended eclipsing binaries.","core_discovery":"The paper establishes that five transiting signals detected by TESS and previously lacking mass measurements are bona fide planets. Using joint fits of radial-velocity and transit data, it reports masses and radii for each: a 33 Earth-mass sub-Saturn in a 16.2-day orbit (TOI-603 b, placed in the Neptune savanna), and hot Jupiters in short-period orbits around slightly evolved stars — TOI-2114 b (about 1 Jupiter mass, eccentricity near 0.47), TOI-4492 b (about 5.9 Jupiter masses, unusually dense), TOI-5806 b (about 2.3-2.8 Jupiter masses, with a bound stellar companion at a projected 248 au), and TOI-5811 B b (about 0.8 Jupiter masses) — the last transiting the visual companion in a hierarchi","pith_inferences":["If the two-in-seven rate of false positives and inconclusive cases seen here scales to the roughly 3,200 unconfirmed TESS hot-Jupiter candidates, a substantial fraction may turn out to be eclipsing binaries or blends; a statistical census applying this confirmation pipeline to a larger random sample would quantify that fraction.","TOI-2114 b's high eccentricity combined with a possible long-term slope suggests that a dedicated radial-velocity campaign could uncover an outer companion; if found, the system would directly test high-eccentricity migration models.","The grazing transit of TOI-5811 B b (impact parameter near 0.97) makes its radius poorly constrained; higher-cadence space photometry could refine the radius and test whether its very low density is real.","The TOI-1137 ambiguity — a planet versus a low-mass star around a hidden K dwarf — could be settled by higher-contrast imaging inside 0.1 arcseconds or by confirming the tentative ellipsoidal variations seen in the TESS data."],"forward_implications":["Four of the five confirmed planets have transmission spectroscopy metrics above 90, making them high-priority targets for atmospheric characterization.","TOI-603 b sits in the sparsely populated Neptune savanna, a region thought to be sculpted by disk-driven migration; its low eccentricity upper limit (below 0.58) is consistent with that population.","TOI-4492 b is unusually dense (about 6.4 g/cm^3) for a giant planet; the paper argues this follows from its high mass and electron degeneracy, and rules out a blended companion as the explanation.","TOI-2114 b's high eccentricity (about 0.47) with a nearly zero RV slope raises the question of an unseen outer companion or a high-eccentricity migration remnant.","TOI-5811 is a hierarchical triple in which the transiting planet orbits the outer component B, and TOI-5806 hosts a planet plus a bound stellar companion, making both S-type planetary systems."],"fun_headline_variants":["Five TESS exoplanet candidates become confirmed worlds","New hot Jupiters: five TESS signals are real planets","Confirmed: five TESS giant planets, four good for atmosphere studies","TESS left-behinds yield five new planets and a false positive"],"cache_read_input_tokens":2304,"weakest_assumption_plain":"For TOI-2114 b, the 7.2-sigma mass significance relies on Gaussian priors on orbital period and epoch inherited from the TESS transit ephemeris, because the radial-velocity data alone are insufficient for an independent detection; if those priors are wrong or an unresolved blended companion dilutes the RV amplitude, that confirmation collapses, while the other four planets have stronger RV support.","fun_headline_variants_meta":{"raw":{"variants":["Five TESS exoplanet candidates become confirmed worlds","New hot Jupiters: five TESS signals are real planets","Confirmed: five TESS giant planets, four good for atmosphere studies","TESS left-behinds yield five new planets and a false positive"]},"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","effort":"low","cost_usd":0.000291,"raw_usage":{"total_tokens":1701,"prompt_tokens":1071,"completion_tokens":630,"prompt_tokens_details":{"cached_tokens":256},"prompt_cache_hit_tokens":256,"prompt_cache_miss_tokens":815,"completion_tokens_details":{"reasoning_tokens":557}},"tokens_in":815,"tokens_out":630,"duration_ms":7085,"temperature":1.0,"reasoning_tokens":557,"cache_read_input_tokens":256,"cache_creation_input_tokens":0},"cache_creation_input_tokens":0},"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:47:27.146343+00:00","model_set":{"reader":"deepseek-v4-flash"},"falsifier":"A decisive test is to gather enough high-precision radial velocities of TOI-2114 to detect the roughly 96 m/s Keplerian signal without imposing the transit-derived period and phase. If the signal is not recovered, or if deep speckle imaging reveals a companion within about 0.1 arcseconds that could dilute the transit depth, the planet claim for TOI-2114 b fails. More broadly, comparing this paper's false-positive fraction with the full TESS hot-Jupiter candidate pool would test whether the leftover candidates are systematically more contaminated.","supporting_citations":[],"review_version":1}