  Young (<1Gyr) exoplanets represent a critically important area of exoplanet
research, as they offer the opportunity to learn about the formation and early
dynamic history of exoplanetary systems. However, finding young exoplanets is
significantly complicated by the fast rotation and complex activity of their
young host stars, which are often not well handled by state-of-the-art
automatic pipelines. This work presents an alternative LOWESS-based pipeline
focused specifically on detrending young stellar light-curves from the
30min-cadence Full Frame Images (FFIs) produced by the Transiting Exoplanet
Survey Satellite ($TESS$), and includes improvements such as automatic
peak-cutting of stellar variability and interpolation over masked transits to
improve periodogram visibility and returned transit shapes. This work presents
the details of the developed pipeline, along with initial results from its
application to young stars within stellar associations in sectors 1-5 of the
$TESS$ data. While no new exoplanet candidate signals were found in this work,
interesting results included the recovery of all known 2min TOIs around young
stars in sectors 1-5 from 30min data alone, the recovery of the young exoplanet
DS Tuc Ab, a number of young eclipsing binaries and a wide array of interesting
rotation. A sensitivity analysis was also undertaken for each star, showing how
recovery of injected planets varied with both depth and period for each
individual target. Challenges for future searches for young exoplanets are
discussed, the largest being stellar rotation with periods less than 1 day and
a lack of a large sample of confirmed young stars.
