Speaker
Description
A number of lines of evidence suggest that additional planets may remain to be discovered in our solar system. Searches for additional planets have been conducted, leading to the discovery of dwarf planets but no larger bodies to date. However, these surveys have not ruled out the existence of additional planets. We recently completed a search for distant planets in data from the Pan-STARRS1 survey. We calibrated our search by injecting an isotropic control population of synthetic detections into Pan-STARRS1 source catalogs, providing a high-fidelity approximation to injecting synthetic sources at the image level. We found that our method is sensitive to a wide range of distances, as well as all rates and directions of motion. We recovered or discovered a total of 692 solar system objects, including 642 TNOs, 23 of which are dwarf planets. Although we did not find Planet Nine or any other planetary objects, we were able to show that the remaining parameter space for Planet Nine is highly concentrated in the galactic plane. We are now applying the lessons learned in our search to data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
