A Search of the Full Six Years of the Dark Energy Survey for Outer Solar System Objects

Bernardinelli, Pedro H.; Bernstein, Gary M.; Sako, Masao; Yanny, Brian; The DES Collaboration

doi:10.3847/1538-4365/ac3914

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A Search of the Full Six Years of the Dark Energy Survey for Outer Solar System Objects

Bernardinelli, Pedro H. et al. (2022)

Published: Feb 1, 2022
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4365/ac3914

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At a GlanceAI

Six years of the Dark Energy Survey yield 812 TNOs (458 new) in a pure, bias-characterized catalog of the southern sky.

SummaryAI

Reprocessing all six years of Dark Energy Survey imaging (5000 square degrees), the authors find 812 TNOs, a Centaur and an Oort cloud comet, 458 of them new. The catalog is complete to r about 23.8 and covers distances from 29 to 2500 au, and it comes with software to simulate its biases. First tests: the data are inconsistent with the CFEPS-L7 classical belt model, the 16 extreme TNOs are consistent with an isotropic distribution, and distant nonresonant TNOs tend to sit sunward of major resonances.

Method SnapshotAI

Image reprocessing, transient detection and orbit linking, visual and sub-threshold verification, bias simulation.

BackgroundAI

Survey selection effects; TNO dynamical classes.

In Collections

Astronomy33 papers

The trans-Neptunian region: surveys, populations and dynamics

The region beyond Neptune holds leftovers of planet formation, and its orbital structure is a record of how the giant planets migrated. This collection goes from the systematic surveys that built the modern census (Deep Ecliptic Survey, CFEPS, OSSOS, the Dark Energy Survey search) through dynamical classification of thousands of objects and population estimates for Neptune's resonances, to resonance sticking, the scattered disk, the coupling between Kozai (ZLK) dynamics and mean-motion resonances, and the distant clustered orbits. It ends with what the next surveys (DEEP, CLASSY, LSST) are designed to answer. Terms: * TNO: trans-Neptunian object * MMR: mean-motion resonance * ZLK(R): von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai (resonance) * DES: two different projects share this acronym here, the Deep Ecliptic Survey (2002, 2005) and the Dark Energy Survey (2022)

Evgeny Smirnov