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Published February 2015 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

A Serendipitous All Sky Survey for Bright Objects in the Outer Solar System

Abstract

We use seven yearʼs worth of observations from the Catalina Sky Survey and the Siding Spring Survey covering most of the northern and southern hemisphere at galactic latitudes higher than 20° to search for serendipitously imaged moving objects in the outer solar system. These slowly moving objects would appear as stationary transients in these fast cadence asteroids surveys, so we develop methods to discover objects in the outer solar system using individual observations spaced by months, rather than spaced by hours, as is typically done. While we independently discover eight known bright objects in the outer solar system, the faintest having V = 19.8 ± 0.1, no new objects are discovered. We find that the survey is nearly 100% efficient at detecting objects beyond 25 AU for V ≾ 19.1 V ≾ 18.6 in the southern hemisphere) and that the probability that there is one or more remaining outer solar system object of this brightness left to be discovered in the unsurveyed regions of the galactic plane is approximately 32%.

Additional Information

© 2015 American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 September 16; accepted 2014 December 8; published 2015 January 19. This search for moving objects in the CRTS catalog has been supported by grant NNX09AB49 G from the NASA Planetary Astronomy program. The CRTS survey was supported by the NSF grants AST-0909182, AST-1313422, and AST-1413600. The CSS survey is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNG05GF22 G issued through the Science Mission Directorate Near-earth Objects Observations Program. This serendipitous survey was conceived during a serendipitous conversation at the LSST "All Hands" meeting between MEB and MJG.

Attached Files

Published - 1538-3881_149_2_69.pdf

Submitted - 1501.00941v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023