TY - JOUR
T1 - Predictions of the LSST Solar System Yield
T2 - Discovery Rates and Characterizations of Centaurs
AU - Murtagh, Joseph
AU - Schwamb, Megan E.
AU - Merritt, Stephanie R.
AU - Bernardinelli, Pedro H.
AU - Kurlander, Jacob A.
AU - Cornwall, Samuel
AU - Jurić, Mario
AU - Fedorets, Grigori
AU - Holman, Matthew J.
AU - Eggl, Siegfried
AU - Nesvorný, David
AU - Volk, Kathryn
AU - Jones, R. Lynne
AU - Yoachim, Peter
AU - Moeyens, Joachim
AU - Kubica, Jeremy
AU - Oldag, Drew
AU - West, Maxine
AU - Chandler, Colin Orion
N1 - This work was supported by a LSST Discovery Alliance LINCC Frameworks Incubator grant [2023-SFF-LFI-01-Schwamb]. Support was provided by Schmidt Sciences. J.M. acknowledges support from the Department for the Economy (DfE) Northern Ireland postgraduate studentship scheme and travel support from the STFC for UK participation in LSST through grant ST/S006206/1. M.E.S. and S.R.M. acknowledge support in part from UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grants ST/V000691/1 and ST/X001253/1. M.J., P.H.B., and J.A.K. acknowledge the support from the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Astronomy, and the DiRAC Institute. The DiRAC Institute is supported through generous gifts from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and the Washington Research Foundation. M.J. wishes to acknowledge the support of the Washington Research Foundation Data Science Term Chair fund and the University of Washington Provost’s Initiative in Data-Intensive Discovery. J.M and J.A.K. thank the LSST-DA Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSST-DA, the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation; their participation in the program has benefited this work. K.V. acknowledges support from NASA (grants 80NSSC23K1169 and 80NSSC23K0886). S.C. and S.E. acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation through award AST-2307570. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This work was supported by a LSST Discovery Alliance LINCC Frameworks Incubator grant [2023-SFF-LFI-01-Schwamb]. Support was provided by Schmidt Sciences. J.M. acknowledges support from the Department for the Economy (DfE) Northern Ireland postgraduate studentship scheme and travel support from the STFC for UK participation in LSST through grant ST/S006206/1. M.E.S. and S.R.M. acknowledge support in part from UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grants ST/V000691/1 and ST/X001253/1. M.J., P.H.B., and J.A.K. acknowledge the support from the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Astronomy, and the DiRAC Institute. The DiRAC Institute is supported through generous gifts from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and the Washington Research Foundation. M.J. wishes to acknowledge the support of the Washington Research Foundation Data Science Term Chair fund and the University of Washington Provost’s Initiative in Data-Intensive Discovery. J.M and J.A.K. thank the LSST-DA Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSST-DA, the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation; their participation in the program has benefited this work. K.V. acknowledges support from NASA (grants 80NSSC23K1169 and 80NSSC23K0886). S.C. and S.E. acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation through award AST-2307570. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work was also supported via the Preparing for Astrophysics with LSST Program, funded by the Heising Simons Foundation through grant 2021–2975 and administered by Las Cumbres Observatory. This work was supported in part by the LSST Discovery Alliance Enabling Science grants program, the B612 Foundation, the University of Washington’s DiRAC (Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology) Institute, the Planetary Society, Karman+, and Breakthrough Listen, Adler Planetarium through generous support of the LSST Solar System Readiness Sprints. Breakthrough Listen is managed by the Breakthrough Initiatives, sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org). This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. The SPICE Resource files used in this work are described in C. Acton et al. (2018) and C. H. Acton (1996). Simulations in this paper made use of the REBOUND N-body code (H. Rein & S. F. Liu 2012). The simulations were integrated using IAS15, a 15th-order Gauss–Radau integrator (H. Rein & D. S. Spiegel 2015). Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the healpy and HEALPix packages. This work made use of Astropy,20 a community-developed core Python package and an ecosystem of tools and resources for astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022). This material or work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through Cooperative Agreement AST-1258333 and Cooperative Support Agreement AST-1836783 managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and the Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory managed by Stanford University. We are grateful for use of the computing resources from the Northern Ireland High Performance Computing (NI-HPC) service funded by EPSRC (EP/T022175). We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Center for Advanced Computing and Modeling, University of Rijeka (Croatia), for providing supercomputing resources at HPC (High Performance Computing) Bura. We are particularly grateful to Noemí Pinilla-Alonso for providing the original data for the spectra of (5145) Pholus and (54598) Bienor, from which the color analysis of this work was based on. We also thank the anonymous referee for their constructive feedback, which improved this manuscript. The authors wish to acknowledge the researchers who worked tirelessly to rapidly develop COVID-19 vaccines and subsequent boosters. Without all their efforts, we would not have been able to pursue this work.
This work was also supported via the Preparing for Astrophysics with LSST Program, funded by the Heising Simons Foundation through grant 2021–2975 and administered by Las Cumbres Observatory. This work was supported in part by the LSST Discovery Alliance Enabling Science grants program, the B612 Foundation, the University of Washington’s DiRAC (Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology) Institute, the Planetary Society, Karman+, and Breakthrough Listen, Adler Planetarium through generous support of the LSST Solar System Readiness Sprints. Breakthrough Listen is managed by the Breakthrough Initiatives, sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation ( http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org ).
We are grateful for use of the computing resources from the Northern Ireland High Performance Computing (NI-HPC) service funded by EPSRC (EP/T022175). We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Center for Advanced Computing and Modeling, University of Rijeka (Croatia), for providing supercomputing resources at HPC (High Performance Computing) Bura.
This material or work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through Cooperative Agreement AST-1258333 and Cooperative Support Agreement AST-1836783 managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and the Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory managed by Stanford University.
PY - 2025/8/4
Y1 - 2025/8/4
N2 - The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will start by the end of 2025 and operate for 10 yr, offering billions of observations of the southern night sky. One of its main science goals is to create an inventory of the solar system, allowing for a more detailed understanding of small-body populations, including the Centaurs, which will benefit from the survey’s high cadence and depth. In this paper, we establish the first discovery limits for Centaurs throughout the LSST’s decade-long operation using the best available dynamical models. Using the survey simulator Sorcha, we predict a roughly 7-fold increase in Centaurs in the Minor Planet Center (MPC) database, reaching ∼1200-2000 (dependent on definition) by the end of the survey—about 50% of which are expected within the first 2 yr. Approximately 30-50 Centaurs will be observed twice as frequently, as they fall within one of the LSST’s Deep Drilling Fields (DDF) for on average only up to 2 months. Outside of the DDFs, Centaurs will receive ∼200 observations across the ugrizy filter range, facilitating searches for cometary-like activity through point-spread function extension analysis, as well as fitting light curves and phase curves for color determination. Regardless of definition, over 200 Centaurs will achieve high-quality color measurements across at least three filters in the LSST’s six filters. These observations will also provide over 300 well-defined phase curves in the griz bands, improving absolute magnitude measurements to a precision of 0.2 mag.
AB - The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will start by the end of 2025 and operate for 10 yr, offering billions of observations of the southern night sky. One of its main science goals is to create an inventory of the solar system, allowing for a more detailed understanding of small-body populations, including the Centaurs, which will benefit from the survey’s high cadence and depth. In this paper, we establish the first discovery limits for Centaurs throughout the LSST’s decade-long operation using the best available dynamical models. Using the survey simulator Sorcha, we predict a roughly 7-fold increase in Centaurs in the Minor Planet Center (MPC) database, reaching ∼1200-2000 (dependent on definition) by the end of the survey—about 50% of which are expected within the first 2 yr. Approximately 30-50 Centaurs will be observed twice as frequently, as they fall within one of the LSST’s Deep Drilling Fields (DDF) for on average only up to 2 months. Outside of the DDFs, Centaurs will receive ∼200 observations across the ugrizy filter range, facilitating searches for cometary-like activity through point-spread function extension analysis, as well as fitting light curves and phase curves for color determination. Regardless of definition, over 200 Centaurs will achieve high-quality color measurements across at least three filters in the LSST’s six filters. These observations will also provide over 300 well-defined phase curves in the griz bands, improving absolute magnitude measurements to a precision of 0.2 mag.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105011619428
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105011619428#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.3847/1538-3881/ade1db
DO - 10.3847/1538-3881/ade1db
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105011619428
SN - 0004-6256
VL - 170
JO - Astronomical Journal
JF - Astronomical Journal
IS - 2
M1 - 98
ER -