Quanquan Hu

Qingtian Liu, Jian Ge, XingChen Yan et al.

We present DEtection in phase-folded Light curves with cOntrastive Scoring (DELOS), a contrastive-learning-based framework designed to search for shallow transits in Kepler photometry. DELOS combines GPU-accelerated phase folding, optimized phase binning, and a custom one-dimensional convolutional encoder to assign a transit-likeness score to each folded light curve, thereby producing a score periodogram over trial periods without relying on pre-detected threshold-crossing events. Focusing on intermediate-to-long-period signals with orbital periods of 100-150 days, DELOS was trained on 20 million synthetic light curves generated with realistic transit models and Kepler-like noise properties, achieving a validation accuracy of 99.3 percent on the synthetic validation set. In controlled injection-recovery experiments, DELOS improves the combined precision-recall performance by 15.5 percent relative to Box-fitting Least Squares (BLS) and 11.25 percent relative to Transit Least Squares (TLS) in the low Signal-to-Noise Ratios (low-SNR) regime. It also accelerates the search by factors of approximately 3-5 and 74-80 compared with BLS and TLS, respectively. Applied to a selected Kepler validation sample, DELOS recovered all known shallow intermediate-to-long-period transit signals in the tested period range. These results demonstrate that DELOS provides an efficient and sensitive framework for low-SNR transit searches and represents a practical step toward future searches for longer-period terrestrial planets in Kepler, K2, TESS, PLATO, and Earth 2.0 data. Accordingly, this work is intended as a methodological development and validation study, with the detailed astrophysical validation of newly identified candidates deferred to future work.

Kaitlyn Wang, Jian Ge, Kevin Willis et al.

Of over 5,000 exoplanets identified so far, only a few hundred possess sub-Earth radii. The formation processes of these sub-Earths remain elusive, and acquiring additional samples is essential for investigating this unique population. In our study, we employ the GPFC method, a novel GPU Phase Folding algorithm combined with a Convolutional Neural Network, on Kepler photometry data. This method enhances the transit search speed significantly over the traditional Box-fitting Least Squares method, allowing a complete search of the known Kepler KOI data within days using a commercial GPU card. To date, we have identified five new ultra-short-period planets (USPs): Kepler-158d, Kepler-963c, Kepler-879c, Kepler-1489c, and KOI-4978.02. Kepler-879c with a radius of $0.4 R_\oplus$ completes its orbit around a G dwarf in 0.646716 days. Kepler-158d with a radius of $0.43 R_\oplus$ orbits a K dwarf star every 0.645088 days. Kepler-1489c with a radius of $0.51 R_\oplus$ orbits a G dwarf in 0.680741 days. Kepler-963c with a radius of $0.6 R_\oplus$ revolves around a G dwarf in 0.919783 days, and KOI-4978.02 with a radius of $0.7 R_\oplus$ circles a G dwarf in 0.941967 days. Among our findings, Kepler-879c, Kepler-158d and Kepler-963c rank as the first, the third, the fourth smallest USPs identified to date. Notably, Kepler-158d stands as the smallest USP found orbiting K dwarfs while Kepler-963c, Kepler-879c, Kepler-1489c, and KOI-4978.02 are the smallest USPs found orbiting G dwarfs. Kepler-879c, Kepler-158d, Kepler-1489c, and KOI-4978.02 are among the smallest planets that are closest to their host stars, with orbits within 5 stellar radii. In addition, these discoveries highlight GPFC's promising capability in identifying small, new transiting exoplanets within photometry data from Kepler, TESS, and upcoming space transit missions, PLATO and ET.