A serendipitous all sky survey for bright objects in the outer solar system

TL;DR

This study utilizes seven years of sky survey data to develop methods for detecting bright, slowly moving objects in the outer solar system, successfully identifying known objects but finding no new ones, and estimating discovery probabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to find outer solar system objects using observations spaced by months, enhancing detection of slow-moving objects in existing survey data.

Findings

Successfully discovered 8 known outer solar system objects.

Survey is nearly 100% efficient for objects brighter than V~19.1 beyond 25 AU.

Estimated 32% probability of undiscovered objects remaining in unsurveyed regions.

Abstract

We use seven year's 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 degrees 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 8 known bright objects in the outer solar system, the faintest having $V=19.8\pm0.1$, no new objects are discovered. We find that the survey is nearly 100% efficient at detecting objects beyond 25 AU for $V\lesssim 19.1$ ($V\lesssim18.6$ 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%.