Determine the false positive rate (reliability) of TESS planet candidates in this sample

Determine the false positive rate (reliability) of planet candidates detected by the TESS transit search pipeline in the analyzed FGK metal-poor star sample, particularly for short-period (1–10 day) super-Earth candidates in the metallicity range −0.5 < [Fe/H] ≤ −0.25, so that occurrence rate inferences do not rely on assuming either all candidates are real or all are false positives.

Background

The paper analyzes approximately 110,000 FGK stars with spectroscopically derived metallicities using TESS data to probe super-Earth occurrence as a function of host metallicity. In the control bin (−0.5 < [Fe/H] ≤ −0.25), the authors find three planet candidates but explicitly note a lack of constraints on the false positive rate of these TESS candidates.

Without a measured reliability, the occurrence rate must be evaluated under extreme assumptions (all candidates real vs. all false positives), limiting the precision of the comparison with Kepler/K2 and the robustness of the metallicity trend within the control bin.