Improve timing-coherence validation for long-duration transits

Develop and validate an event-time-coherence test whose per-event timing remains reliable for PLATO transits longer than approximately four hours.

Background

The transit-search pipeline includes an event-time-coherence test inherited from the TESS analysis. The forecast identifies a limitation for long-duration PLATO transits: the per-event timing performance degrades beyond about four hours.

The authors explicitly defer addressing this degradation to a future version of the pipeline, leaving the reliability of the coherence test for such long transits unresolved.

References

(8)~the coherence test's per-event timing degrades for transits longer than about 4~h, a PLATO regime inherited from TESS and deferred to a future version;

— Habitable-zone Earths at the detection frontier: Measured completeness and false-alarm rate of a transit pipeline for the PLATO M-dwarf sample  (2609.04887 - Tschudi, 4 Sep 2026) in Section 4, Limitations