Discussion
Our giant paper is out about the Large inclination Distant Object (LiDO) Survey! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.19865
This was a stunning amount of work and took us several years (including a visit to my farm by 2 of the other co-PIs where we alternated between patting goats, keeping our children happy, and sitting at my kitchen table writing text and writing code to make pretty figures). I'm so glad it's refereed and out in the world finally!
@sundogplanets kudos to persevering with data from pandemic-era observations, what a marathon! 🤯
I know it isn't the main purpose of the research, but I'm always fascinated not just by the numbers but even how big these bodies this far out can be. The Haumea-family ones y'all estimate at 30+ km (~ Arrokoth-size), maybe a few 100+km in the survey then, those with 6-7 abs magnitude? (This mpc conversion table applies to TNOs as well, right? https://minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/Sizes.html)
@sundogplanets very cool work! And such an excellent feeling when such long projects finally come together!
@vicgrinberg ESPECIALLY right before I have to submit a big grant proposal! "In press" sounds SO much better than "in review"
@sundogplanets Congratulations! One of my career goals is to be sent to your "farm upstate". So I guess we need to start working together on harder problems than satellite constellations! 😉
@hannorein My kitchen table is available for paper-writing anytime! Also my goats are happy to help with writing breaks.
@sundogplanets @hannorein when things go tits up down here can American academics escape to your farm
@rooster @hannorein YES please come anytime! Having a farm commune made entirely of recovering academics is really my ultimate plan here
@sundogplanets @hannorein nice draft...are you going to eat that?
The point of this survey was to find moderately high inclination TNOs, specifically, Plutinos in the 3:2 mean-motion resonance with Neptune that are also in the Kozai resonance. We picked 2 patches on the sky that we knew from models would probably have lots of these, and then tracked them over 3 years, to very high orbital precision, to make sure we could diagnose mean-motion resonances very accurately
We diagnosed resonances by taking clones of the TNOs' best-fit orbits within the orbital uncertainties, and integrating them forward for 30 million years using REBOUND, then carefully looking at the resonant angle of several nearby resonances to see if it's confined - we also looked for confinement (rather than circulation) of the argument of pericentre, since that's the key for Kozai libration
Looks really cool! Something for me to think about, read about, and think some more! Fun!
One question: what are the two different phi graphs?
@oldclumsy_nowmad They're 2 different TNOs, showing 2 different resonant behaviours that we saw - the top one isn't in the resonance for 100% of the simulation
Sometimes TNOs show different behaviours in different parts of the orbital uncertainty. But most of the time our orbits were precise enough (and the phase space for different behaviours large enough) that the current dynamical behaviour of the real TNO is very clear.
Here's our new map of the outer Solar System: we detected and tracked 141 TNOs to high precision, 62 of which are in mean-motion resonances with Neptune.
There's a tiny bit of science work testing a model of the hot classical belt orbital distribution, but we mostly want to save our science for separate papers, since this one was already SO long just with the survey and orbital classification descriptions.
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@sundogplanets 🎉 🎉 🎉 HUZZAH!🎉 🎉 🎉