A TESS Search for Distant Solar System Objects: Yield Estimates
Abstract
As the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) fulfills its primary mission, it is executing an unprecedented survey of almost the entire sky: TESS's approved extended mission will likely extend sky coverage to ~94%, including ~60% of the ecliptic. In an accompanying note we demonstrated that `digital tracking' techniques can be used to efficiently `shift-and-stack' TESS full frame images (FFIs) and showed that combining ~1,300 exposures from a TESS sector gives a 50% detection threshold of $I_C\sim 22.0\pm0.5$, raising the possibility that TESS could discover the hypothesized Planet Nine. In this note, we estimate the yield for such a survey and demonstrate that this technique has the potential to discover hundreds of Kuiper Belt Objects, Scattered Disk Objects and Centaurs in TESS FFI data.
- Publication:
-
Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- November 2019
- DOI:
- 10.3847/2515-5172/ab5641
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1911.03676
- Bibcode:
- 2019RNAAS...3..172P
- Keywords:
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- 1469;
- 1464;
- 1671;
- 1705;
- 215;
- 1529;
- 80;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics