Discovery and Physical Characterization of a Large Scattered Disk Object at 92 AU
Abstract
We report the observation and physical characterization of the possible dwarf planet \UZ\ ("DeeDee"), a dynamically detached trans-Neptunian object discovered at 92 AU. This object is currently the second-most distant known trans-Neptunian object with reported orbital elements, surpassed in distance only by the dwarf planet Eris. The object was discovered with an -band magnitude of 23.0 in data collected by the Dark Energy Survey between 2014 and 2016. Its 1140-year orbit has . It will reach its perihelion distance of 38 AU in the year 2142. Integrations of its orbit show it to be dynamically stable on Gyr timescales, with only weak interactions with Neptune. We have performed followup observations with ALMA, using 3 hours of on-source integration time to measure the object's thermal emission in the Rayleigh-Jeans tail. The signal is detected at 7 significance, from which we determine a -band albedo of percent and a diameter of ~km, assuming a spherical body with uniform surface properties.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1702.00731,
title = {Discovery and Physical Characterization of a Large Scattered Disk Object at 92 AU},
author = {David Gerdes and Masao Sako and Stephanie Hamilton and Ke Zhang and Tali Khain and Juliette Becker and James Annis and William Wester and Gary Bernstein and Colin Scheibner and Lynus Zullo and Fred Adams and Edwin Bergin and Alistair Walker and J. H. Mueller and T. Abbott and Filipe Abdalla and Sahar Allam and K. Bechtol and Aurelien Benoit-Lévy and Emmanuel Bertin and David Brooks and David Burke and A. Rosell and M. Kind and Jorge Carretero and Carlos Cunha and Luiz da Costa and S. Desai and H. Thomas Diehl and Tim Eifler and Brenna Flaugher and Joshua Frieman and J. Garc'ia-Bellido and Enrique Gaztanaga and Daniel Goldstein and Daniel Gruen and J. Gschwend and Gaston Gutierrez and Klaus Honscheid and D. James and Stephen M. Kent and E. Krause and Kyler Kuehn and Nikolay Kuropatkin and O. Lahav and T. Li and M. Maia and Marisa Cristina March and Jennifer Marshall and P. Martini and Felipe Menanteau and Ramon Miquel and Robert Nichol and Andres Plazas Malagón and A. Kathy Romer and Aaron Roodman and Eusebio Sanchez and Ignacio Sevilla-Noarbe and Mathew Smith and R. Smith and Marcelle Soares-Santos and Flavia Sobreira and E. Suchyta and M. Swanson and Gregory Tarle and Douglas Tucker and Y. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.00731},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
13 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ Letters