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LSST Could be the Key to Finding New Planets in Our Solar System

posted by martyb on Saturday June 02 2018, @09:46AM   

takyon writes:

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) may be able to find new planets in our solar system, including the hypothesized planets Nine and Ten:

Overall, these estimates indicated that Planet 9/X was a super-Earth with anywhere between 5 to 20 Earth masses, and orbited the Sun at a distance of between 150 – 600 AU. Concurrently, these studies have also attempted to narrow down where this Super-Earth's orbit will take it throughout the outer Solar System, as evidenced by the perturbations it has on KBOs.

Unfortunately, the predicted locations and brightness of the object are not yet sufficiently constrained for astronomers to simply look in the right place at the right time and pick it out. In this respect, a large area sky survey must be carried out using moderately large telescopes with a very wide field of view. As Dr. Trilling told Universe Today via email:

"The predicted Planet X candidates are not particularly faint, but the possible locations on the sky are not very well constrained at all. Therefore, what you really need to find Planet X is a medium-depth telescope that covers a huge amount of sky. This is exactly LSST. LSST's sensitivity will be sufficient to find Planet X in almost all its (their) predicted configurations, and LSST will cover around half of the known sky to this depth. Furthermore, the cadence is well-matched to finding moving objects, and the data processing systems are very advanced. If you were going to design a tool to find Planet X, LSST is what you would design."

On the detectability of Planet X with LSST

Two planetary mass objects in the far outer Solar System --- collectively referred to here as Planet X --- have recently been hypothesized to explain the orbital distribution of distant Kuiper Belt Objects. Neither planet is thought to be exceptionally faint, but the sky locations of these putative planets are poorly constrained. Therefore, a wide area survey is needed to detect these possible planets. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will carry out an unbiased, large area (around 18,000 deg²), deep (limiting magnitude of individual frames of 24.5) survey (the "wide-fast-deep" survey) of the southern sky beginning in 2022, and is therefore an important tool to search for these hypothesized planets. Here we explore the effectiveness of LSST as a search platform for these possible planets. Assuming the current baseline cadence (which includes the wide-fast-deep survey plus additional coverage) we estimate that LSST will confidently detect or rule out the existence of Planet X in 61% of the entire sky. At orbital distances up to ~75 au, Planet X could simply be found in the normal nightly moving object processing; at larger distances, it will require custom data processing. We also discuss the implications of a non-detection of Planet X in LSST data.

Related: Astronomers Seek Widest View Ever of the Universe With New Telescope
Mars-Sized Planetary Mass Object Could be Influencing Nearby Kuiper Belt Objects
Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine
Another Trans-Neptunian Object With a High Orbital Inclination Points to Planet Nine

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Original Submission

• Re:hoped to find them by 2021 (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday June 02 2018, @11:35AM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday June 02 2018, @11:35AM (#687647) Journal

  Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin are searching in a narrow patch of sky using the Subaru telescope. But they have only a fraction of the telescope's time, and some days have had really bad weather, which means a wasted day of observations. Part of their search space intersects with the disk of the Milky Way, which is unhelpful. Planet Nine could be closer to aphelion, making it much harder to detect. And if their search parameters are wrong, then they could be wasting their time looking at the wrong part of the sky.

  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/looking-for-planet-nine-astronomers-gaze-into-the-abyss/ [scientificamerican.com]

  High-altitude weather sometimes fouls the narrow observational windows, and both teams’ recent observing sessions at Subaru have been decidedly unlucky. Near-continual snow and hail blotted out the sky for Brown and Batygin on one fruitless run last December; their final night was particularly grim, when an igloolike shell of ice frozen to Subaru’s protective dome prevented them from even accessing the telescope. On another trip in January poor weather prevented Sheppard and Trujillo from making 70 percent of their planned observations. During Brown and Batygin’s most recent outing in February persistent high-altitude winds smeared the stars into pancakelike shapes, scuttling the search. “I like pancakes,” Brown quipped on Twitter, “but not this many.” Plagued by poor weather, what began as a sprint to the finish has turned into a longer slog.

  [...] “The stinging possibility here is that Planet Nine is just frickin’ far out, and then we have to wait for a new generation of better telescopes to find it,” Batygin says. “Another possibility I try not to think about too much is that it’s in the galactic plane.” That’s the disk of the Milky Way that arcs like a glowing backbone through the night sky. A fraction of Planet Nine’s proposed orbit passes through this region, where the dim, glacially creeping planetary dot could hide in a thick fog of background stars.

  Only one near-future facility can easily pierce the Milky Way’s luminous veil: the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a behemoth of an observatory with an 8.4-meter wide-field mirror hooked up to a three-gigapixel camera. Currently under construction in Chile and set to begin its survey in 2022, during each night’s observations the LSST will capture 20 terabytes’ worth of panoramic views of the sky overhead to create a celestial time-lapse movie of unprecedented depth and detail. Its expansive view is likely to uncover hundreds if not thousands of additional extreme TNOs, providing a flood of hard data to further test Brown and Batygin’s hypothesis. Even if Planet Nine is rather dim, particularly far away and in front of the galactic plane, the most crucial evidence for or against its existence should pop out of LSST’s colossal database within a few years of the survey’s debut—presuming it is not found before then.

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  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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