A Search for L4 Earth Trojan Asteroids Using a Novel Track-Before-Detect Multi-Epoch Pipeline

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel shift-and-stack detection pipeline to search for Earth Trojan Asteroids using Dark Energy Camera data, setting new upper limits on their population despite detecting none.

Contribution

The paper presents a new multi-epoch shift-and-stack method for detecting Earth Trojans and provides updated population constraints based on extensive simulations.

Findings

No new Earth Trojans were found.

Established upper limits on Earth Trojan population at various brightness levels.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of the novel detection pipeline.

Abstract

Earth Trojan Asteroids are an important but elusive population that co-orbit with Earth at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points. There is only one known, but a large population is theoretically stable and could provide insight into our solar system's past and present as well as planetary defense. In this paper, we present the results of an Earth Trojan survey that uses a novel shift-and-stack detection method on two nights of data from the Dark Energy Camera. We find no new Earth Trojan Asteroids. We calculate an upper limit on the population that is consistent with previous searches despite much less sky coverage. Additionally, we elaborate on previous upper limit calculations using current asteroid population statistics and an extensive asteroid simulation to provide the most up to date population constraints. We find an L4 Earth Trojan population of NET < 1 for H = 13.93, NET < 7 for H = 16, and NET < 938 for H = 22.