A 3pi Search for Planet Nine at 3.4 microns with WISE and NEOWISE

A. M. Meisner, B. C. Bromley, S. J. Kenyon, T. E. Anderson
(Submitted on 13 Dec 2017)

The
recent ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis has led to many observational and
archival searches for this giant planet proposed to orbit the Sun at
hundreds of astronomical units. While trans-Neptunian object searches
are typically conducted in the optical, models suggest Planet Nine could
be self-luminous and potentially bright enough at ~3-5 microns to be
detected by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We have
previously demonstrated a Planet Nine search methodology based on
time-resolved WISE coadds, allowing us to detect moving objects much
fainter than would be possible using single-frame extractions. In the
present work, we extend our 3.4 micron (W1) search to cover more than
three quarters of the sky and incorporate four years of WISE
observations spanning a seven year time period. This represents the
deepest and widest-area WISE search for Planet Nine to date. We
characterize the spatial variation of our survey’s sensitivity and rule
out the presence of Planet Nine in the parameter space searched at W1
< 16.7 in high Galactic latitude regions (90% completeness). Comments:    some edits based on referee report
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1712.04950 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1712.04950v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Aaron Meisner
[v1] Wed, 13 Dec 2017 19:00:06 GMT (803kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04950