Accepted Transit File Formats in EXOFAST

The EXOFAST interface accepts time series uploaded by users in a similar way to the periodogram service. If the service is not accepting your input file, make sure it fits the following formatting rules.

Please note that input tables are limited to 5,000 lines to avoid excessive processing times and to balance server resources.

Units must be as specified below, or the fit will be wrong or fail.

Photometric Time Series

The photometry file must contain at least three columns specifying the light curve. Optionally, it can have any number of additional columns, which can be used to de-trend the light curve (e.g., airmass at each time), such as:

• Time (BJD_TDB—See Eastman et al. 2010)
• Normalized flux (mean out of transit flux approximately equals 1)
• Error in normalized flux
• Detrend parameter 1 (optional)
• Detrend parameter 2 (optional)

Input File Format

• File Name:
  • Acceptable: alpha-numeric characters, underscore ( _ ), hyphen ( - ) period ( . ), plus ( + ), and colon ( : ).
  • Not accepted: Spaces, quotation marks ( " or ' ), and file names cannot start with a period (e.g. ".lightcurveTransit.txt").
• Format: ASCII (plain text), preferably with a .txt file extension, but other file extensions are accepted. (Note that the interface is able to parse space-separated, comma-separated, and IPAC format tables, among others.)
• Headers: In the absence of a header row, the service initially assigns the first two non-character, non-zero-deviation columns as the time and flux columns, respectively. The third non-character column is assigned as the uncertainty column. Any additional columns are assumed to be detrending vectors.
• Column separators: Data may be separated by commas, spaces, tabs or pipes ( | ).
• Blank rows are filtered out.
• NaN values must be explicitly identified in the header (in IPAC table format), or replaced with a blank space.

Other Standards

Photometric time series files returned by the NASA Exoplanet Archive are accepted. However, the files are subject to the line number limit described above; also, to run properly, the photometric time series must be flux-normalized and contain at least one transit. Trimming excess data can also help decrease processing time significantly. This is not done automatically by the Exoplanet Archive, so there is currently no facility to directly access archive light curves via the EXOFAST web interface.

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Last updated: 19 July 2017