A Pan-STARRS Search for Distant Planets: Part 1

TL;DR

This paper details a Pan-STARRS1 survey that identified numerous distant solar system objects, including new TNOs, demonstrating the survey's sensitivity and refining the search space for Planet Nine.

Contribution

The study introduces a high-fidelity synthetic detection injection method and reports the discovery of 109 new objects, enhancing the understanding of distant solar system populations.

Findings

Identified 109 new solar system objects, including 642 TNOs.

Survey is the third most productive Kuiper Belt survey to date.

Remaining search space for Planet Nine is concentrated in the galactic plane.

Abstract

We present a search for distant planets in Pan-STARRS1. We calibrated our search by injecting an isotropic control population of synthetic detections into Pan-STARRS1 source catalogs, providing a high-fidelity alternative to injecting synthetic sources at the image level. We found that our method is sensitive to a wide range of distances, as well as all rates and directions of motion. We identified 692 solar system objects (109 of which are not yet listed in the Minor Planet Center's database), including 642 TNOs, 23 of which are dwarf planets. By raw number of detections, this makes our search the third most productive Kuiper Belt survey to date, in spite of the fact that we did not explicitly search for objects closer than 80 au. Although we did not find Planet Nine or any other planetary objects, we were able to show that the remaining parameter space for Planet Nine is highly concentrated in the galactic plane.