A TESS Search for Distant Solar System Objects: Yield Estimates

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of TESS's extended sky survey and digital tracking techniques to discover distant Solar System objects, including Kuiper Belt Objects and possibly Planet Nine, by analyzing its data capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate TESS's yield for discovering distant Solar System objects using digital tracking on full frame images.

Findings

TESS can potentially discover hundreds of Kuiper Belt Objects and Centaurs.

Digital tracking enhances detection sensitivity in TESS data.

TESS's extended mission could include significant Solar System object discoveries.

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.