2024/12/02 by Jacob A. Kurlander, Kurlander, Jacob A., Matthew J. Holman +9 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.01687
To prepare for the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we develop methods for quantifying the selection function of a wide-field survey as a function of all six orbital parameters and absolute magnitude. We perform a HelioLinC3D search for Centaurs in the Pan-STARRS1 detection catalog and use a synthetic debiasing population to characterize our survey's selection function. We find nine new objects, including Centaur 2010 RJ226, among 320 real objects, along with ∼70,000 debiasing objects. We use the debiasing population to fit a selection function and apply the selection function to a model Centaur population with literature orbital and size distributions. We confirm the model's marginal distributions but reject its joint distribution, and estimate an intrinsic population of 21,400+3,400-2,800 Centaurs with Hr < 13.7. The discovery of only nine new objects in archival data verifies that the Pan-STARRS discovery pipeline had high completeness, but also shows that new linking algorithms can contribute even to traditional single-tracklet surveys. As the first systematic application of HelioLinC3D to a survey with extensive sky coverage, this project proves the viability of HelioLinC3D as a discovery algorithm for big-data wide-field surveys.