Variable stars in LMC MACHO fields 1 & 79

TFA has been applied successfully in planetary transit searches, where weak, short-lasting periodic dimmings are sought in the presence of noise and various systematics (due to, e.g., imperfect flat fielding, crowding, etc). These latter effects introduce colored noise in the photometric time series that can completely overwhelm the signal.

By using a large number of available photometric time series of a given field, TFA utilizes the fact that the same types of systematics appear in several/many time series of the same field. As a result, we attempt to reproduce each target time series by a linear combination of templates, optimized by least-squares. After a signal has been identified in the residuals between the original time series and the systematics computed by TFA, we reconstruct the signal by employing the full model, including the signal, systematics and noise.