| Name: | Surhud More |
| Affiliation: | IUCAA |
| Conference ID : | ASI2023_588 |
| Title : | Subaru Search for Planet Nine |
| Authors : | Surhud More, Michael E. Brown, Konstantin Batygin, Fumi Yoshida, Naoki Yasuda, Masahiro Takada, Robert Lupton, Shefali Negi |
| Mode of Presentation: | Oral |
| Abstract Category : | Sun and the Solar System |
| Abstract : | Planet Nine has been primarily proposed to explain the observed structure of the Kuiper belt objects with semi-major axes beyond 200 AU. Other lines of evidence, such as the detachment of the perihelia of outer solar system objects from Neptune, and the highly inclined orbits of some of the long period objects also point towards this hypothesis. In this talk, I will report on our multi-year observational program to search for Planet Nine with the Hyper Suprime-Cam instrument on the 8 meter Subaru telescope. We were allocated a total of 21 nights of observational time out of which we lost 40 percent due to bad weather. We were able to image over 200 sq degrees of data on multiple consecutive nights. The area covers the sky region near the apocenters of the proposed path of Planet Nine. The data was reduced with the state-of-the-art Rubin science pipelines and difference imaged in order to find moving objects. These objects were then linked to find candidates which match the orbits of Planet nine, and then finally visually inspected. We characterize the effectiveness of our detections by injecting simulated Planet nine candidates in raw imaging data, and run those through our end to end pipeline. Our pipeline is able to recover more than 90 percent of detectable simulated candidates out to a limiting magnitude of the survey (median limiting magnitude > 24). I will describe the challenges involved with the data reduction, management of a bleeding edge software pipeline over computing clusters separated over multiple continents and having to deal with a large number of false positive detections in difference images. I will report on the current best constraints on the existence of Planet Nine. |
