Collaborative Research: Characterizing the Trans-Neptunian Solar System with the Dark Energy Survey

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite centuries of scanning the skies, it is only now that humans are able to begin to really search for and identify many of the most distant objects in our own Solar System, those that orbit well beyond Neptune. These objects are becoming accessible through ongoing surveys using telescopes on the Earth that scan large parts of the sky repeatedly. These surveys allow detection of very faint objects, as well as their motion and any changes in brightness. The objects are important to understand because they are the remnants of the early Solar System and can help us understand how our Solar System formed and evolved into what we see today. This project will capitalize on an ongoing survey in the southern hemisphere by developing new data processing tools to carry out an extensive search for transient and slow-moving objects in the survey images in order to characterize the most distant visible members of the Solar System. The proposal team will augment their successful outreach program to Philadelphia-area middle school teachers and community-based organizations through their partnership with the Franklin Institute to produce presentations and middle-school curricular materials on the outer solar system. A key component of the program will be a contest to suggest names for minor planets that are discovered in the data used in this project. The PIs will also mentor two graduate students and undergraduate students working in a large international team of astronomers and particle physicists from a myriad of cultural backgrounds through participation in this project. This is a collaborative proposal that seeks to expand the use of data being obtained as a part of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Cerro-Tololo 4m telescope. In particular, they will extend the standard DES data processing in order to carry out an extensive search for transient and slow-moving objects in the DES images in order to characterize the most distant visible members of the Solar System, which orbit well beyond Neptune and are relics of major disturbances to the nascent Solar System. This will enable them to increase by a factor of ~10 the number of known Inner Oort Cloud bodies and other minor planets with perihelia beyond about 50 AU, which have dynamical and physical states that are largely unperturbed by interactions with the (known) planets over the age of the Solar System.