http://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10144
The Latitude Density Search utilized Hyper Suprime-Cam on Subaru Telescope to discover 60 moving objects in the outer Solar System, 54 of which have semi-major axes beyond 30 AU. The two night orbit arcs are insufficient for tracking, but the images were acquired in exceptional seeing (0.4″) and reached a detection limit of m_r~=25.2. We searched the detections for binary sources, and identified one binary object with a separation of 0.34″, the previously known object 2010 HE79 (471165). Although we would have been able to identify binaries with the same separation and relative brightness for 18% of the 54 trans-Neptunian objects in the search, or 88% of objects with a brighter secondary, only one binary was found in the sample. This detection rate is lower than expected based on previous work, particularly for the cold classical objects, and implies that the prevalence of binary trans-Neptunian objects with 7.5~< H_r ~<9 may be significantly lower than for larger objects.
R. Pike, J. Kanwar, M. Alexandersen, et. al.
Wed, 29 Jan 20
9/46
Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures