English

A TESS Search for Distant Solar System Objects: Yield Estimates

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2019-11-12 v1

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 IC22.0±0.5I_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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.03676,
  title  = {A TESS Search for Distant Solar System Objects: Yield Estimates},
  author = {Matthew J Payne and Matthew J Holman and András Pál},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.03676},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:10:12.312Z