Sensitivity recovery from two heavily contaminated transits

Determine whether pairing two heavily red-noise-contaminated JWST transit observations can recover exomoon-radius sensitivity comparable to that obtained from cleaner two-epoch combinations, as observed when only one of the two epochs is contaminated.

Background

The study finds that observation #51 of LP 890-9 c is strongly affected by red noise and, when analyzed alone, yields a much weaker 2-sigma exomoon-radius upper limit than the other individual transits. However, pairing this contaminated epoch with a second, cleaner transit restores a sensitivity statistically comparable to that of pairings composed of clean epochs. This suggests that multi-epoch observations may break degeneracies that allow red noise to mimic exomoon signals.

The paper explicitly leaves unresolved whether the same recovery of sensitivity would occur when both epochs in a two-transit analysis are heavily contaminated by red noise. Resolving this question is important for planning JWST exomoon searches and for assessing whether additional transits can mitigate severe systematics when no clean epoch is available.