Transiting a bright star, the “Neptune desert” planet HD 219666b was one of the more important early discoveries from the TESS survey. With a depth of only 0.17 per cent, the transits would be a challenge for any ground-based transit survey.

Nevertheless, we think we’ve found them in WASP-South lightcurves dating back to 2010. Here they are:

The orange lines show times of transit, as found by the WASP transit-detection algorithms. The shallow dips seem to be real, since they align both in period and in phase with the dips seen in the TESS lightcurve. The output from the WASP search algorithm is not itself that convincing:

However, the period that it finds (6.03446 days) matches the TESS period to an accuracy of 0.03 per cent, and the WASP ephemeris then predicts the times of the TESS transits bang on (they occur at 420.99999 cycles on the WASP ephemeris), which together mean that the detection must be real. Here are the WASP data folded on a template of the TESS transit:

With a depth of 0.17 per cent, the transits of HD 219666b are the shallowest that WASP has detected.

The benefit of looking for such pre-detections of TESS planets is that we can then produce a transit ephemeris based on data spanning a baseline of 8 years, rather than the 20 days spanned by the TESS transits. This means we can predict future transits to an accuracy of minutes, instead of hours, which is highly useful for future observations. Hence this WASP-South detection of HD 219666b transits is well worth an AAS Research Note.