From Minimoons to Planet 9

Mario Juric (University of Washington)

June 09, 2022

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Abstract: The small bodies of the Solar System are a valuable tracer of its present-day structure, its evolution, and ultimately provide clues into the early times of its formation. In the next 5 years, the known sample of all small body populations will grow 10-50x, driven by large survey programs. For example, the DEEP survey on the Blanco 4m is looking to double the number of known KBOs. The LSST will generate a billion measurements of millions of Solar System objects, with simulations predicting ~100,000 new discoveries of nearby NEOs (Jones et al. 2017), 5.5 million for the main belt, and ~40,000-200,000 for the trans-Neptunian populations (Ivezic et al 2019; Juric et al. 2019). In this talk I will present what to expect from these surveys — focusing on ZTF, DEEP, and LSST — including some early results. I will also discuss the techniques to find small bodies in survey datasets, and places where new algorithms are significantly increasing our discovery yields. I will conclude with an overview of the LSST’s transformative sample, and science opportunities it will bring to the community at large.