Assessing the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite’s Yield of Rocky Planets Around Nearby M Dwarfs

Terrestrial planets are easier to detect around M dwarfs than other types of stars, making them promising for next-generation atmospheric characterization studies. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission has greatly increased the number of known M-dwarf planets that we can use to perform population studies, allowing us to explore how the rocky planet occurrence rate varies with host radius, following in the footsteps of past work with Kepler data. In this paper, we use simulations to assess TESS’s yield of small (0.5 R ⊕ < R p < 2 R ⊕ ) planet candidates around nearby ( d < 30 pc) M dwarfs. We highlight the underappreciated fact that, while TESS was indeed expected to find a large number of planets around M dwarfs overall, it was not expected to have a high planetary yield for the latest M dwarfs. Furthermore, we find that TESS has detected fewer planets around stars with R ⋆ < 0.3 R ⊙ than even was expected (11 observed versus 24 ± 5 expected). We find evidence that the photometric noise of stars in the TESS bandpass increases with decreasing radius for M dwarfs. However, this trend cannot explain the observed distribution of planets. Our main conclusions are (1) the planet occurrence rate likely does not increase, and may decrease for the latest M dwarfs; and (2) there are at least 17, and potentially three times that number, transiting planets around nearby late-M dwarfs that still will not be detected by the end of TESS’s fourth year.