Astrometry and Occultation predictions to Trans-Neptunian and Centaur Objects observed within the Dark Energy Survey
Creators: name: Banda-Huarca, Martin
name: Camargo, Julio
name: Desmars, Josselin
name: Ogando, Ricardo
name: Vieira-Martins, Roberto
name: Assafin, Marcelo
name: da Costa, Luiz
name: Bernstein, Gary
name: Kind, Matias Carrasco
name: Wagner, Alex Drlica
name: Gomes, Rodney
name: Gysi, Matheus
name: Ribas, Felipe Braga
name: Maia, Marcio
name: Gerdes, David
name: Hamilton, Stephanie
name: Wester, William
name: Abbot, Tim
name: Abdalla, Filipe
name: Allam, Sahar
name: Avila, Santiago
name: Bertin, Emmanuel
name: Brooks, David
name: Buckley-Geer, Elizabeth
name: Burke, David
name: Rossell, Aurelio Carnero
name: Carretero, Jorge
name: Cunha, Carlos
name: Davis, Christopher
name: de Vicente, Juan
name: Diehl, Thomas
name: Doel, Peter
name: Fosalba, Pablo
name: Frieman, Josh
name: Garcia-Bellido, Juan
name: Gaztanaga, Enrique
name: Gruen, Daniel
name: Gruendl, Robert
name: Gschwend, Julia
name: Gutierrez, Gaston
name: Hartley, Will
name: Hollowood, Devon
name: Honscheid, Klaus
name: James, David
name: Kuehn, Kyler
name: Kuropatkin, Nikolay
name: Menanteau, Felipe
name: Miller, Christopher
name: Miquel, Ramon
name: Plazas, Andres
name: Romer, Kathy
name: Sanchez, Eusebio
name: Scarpine, Vic
name: Schubnell, Michael
name: Serrano, Santiago
name: Sevilla, Ignacio
name: Smith, Mathew
name: Soares-Santos, Marcelle
name: Sobreira, Flavia
name: Suchyta, Eric
name: Swanson, Molly
name: Tarle, Gregory
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Transneptunian objects (TNOs) are a source of invaluable information to access the history and evolution of the outer solar system. However, observing these faint objects is a difficult task. As a consequence, important properties such as size and albedo are known for only a small fraction of them. Now, with the results from deep sky surveys and the Gaia space mission, a new exciting era is within reach as accurate predictions of stellar occultations by numerous distant small solar system bodies become available. From them, diameters with kilometer accuracies can be determined. Albedos, in turn, can be obtained from diameters and absolute magnitudes. We use observations from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) from November 2012 until February 2016, amounting to 4292847 CCD frames. We searched them for all known small solar system bodies and recovered a total of 202 TNOs and Centaurs, 63 of which have been discovered by the DES collaboration until the date of this writing. Their positions were determined using the Gaia Data Release 2 as reference and their orbits were refined. Stellar occultations were then predicted using these refined orbits plus stellar positions from Gaia. These predictions are maintained, and updated, in a dedicated web service. The techniques developed here are also part of an ambitious preparation to use the data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), that expects to obtain accurate positions and multifilter photometry for tens of thousands of TNOs.
description: 25 pages, submitted to Astronomical Journal