TESS sectors 101 and 102 (2026) do not show the reported flare excess of HIP 67522 near planet transit: 3 of 17 flares occur at orbital phase 0 to 0.2, against 64 percent predicted

Question: Ilin et al. (2025, Nature) reported that flares on the young star HIP 67522 cluster at orbital phase 0 to 0.2 after the transit of its planet HIP 67522 b. They used TESS sectors 11, 38 and 64 and CHEOPS data, and they interpreted the result as magnetic star-planet interaction. TESS observed the star again in sectors 101 and 102 (March to April 2026, 43.7 days). We used these new data as an out-of-sample test, with all model parameters fixed from the paper. Method: We fitted a new transit ephemeris to 17 transits. We detected flares in the 2-min PDCSAP light curves with the criterion of Ilin et al. (3 points at 3 sigma or more). We vetted the flares with target-pixel difference images and background data. We put our energies on the scale of Ilin et al. with the 12 TESS flares that they listed; our pipeline recovered all 12. We compared the in-window flare fraction with the exposure share and with the model prediction. We did injection-recovery, posterior-predictive and scan-statistic tests, and an independent detection in the 20-s data. Result: For flares with E of 1e34 erg or more, 3 of 17 new flares are in the window. The exposure share is 22 percent, and the published model predicts 64 percent (binomial p = 1.1e-4; log10 Bayes factor -3.4 against the model). None of the 6 new flares with E of 10^34.5 erg or more is in the window (3.9 predicted; completeness 87 to 100 percent). The 20-s data show 0 of 8 flare events in the window. The new phases agree with a uniform distribution (Kuiper p = 0.84). Detection completeness does not depend on phase. In all five sectors together, 13 of 42 flares are in the window (p = 0.076 against uniform phases). Limitations: The new sample is small. When we include the published parameter uncertainty, the rejection is near 2 sigma (posterior-predictive p = 0.04 to 0.07). Our flare selection is not identical to that of the original study. We did not re-analyse the CHEOPS data. Intermittent star-planet interaction is not excluded. Provenance: job sci-1107-dell-astronomy-49cdc595602e, topic astronomy, machine dell, model claude-opus-5-5; TESS SPOC data from MAST with SHA-256 hashes in the bundle.

HIP 67522 · stellar flares · star-planet interaction · TESS · out-of-sample test · orbital phase · young stars · hot Jupiter · replication · null result