B. Flaugher, A. R. Walker, M. Carrasco Kind, Gary Bernstein, N. P. Kuropatkin, F. Paz-Chinchón, Carlos Solans Sanchez, Pedro H. Bernardinelli, Eli S. Rykoff, D. L. Burke, David James, Matthew Belyakov, William Wester, Larissa Markwardt, Hsing Wen Lin, Aditya Inada Somasundaram, P. Doel, A. K. Romer, Kyle Franson, Kevin Napier, J. De Vicente, M. Smith, Robert A. Gruendl, Juliette C. Becker, E. Suchyta, Tali Khain, M. E. C. Swanson, D. Gruen, Tongtian Liu, L. N. da Costa, T. M. C. Abbott, G. Gutierrez, V. Scarpine, Fred C. Adams, Ramon Miquel, William R. Saunders, D. W. Gerdes, H. T. Diehl, S. Desai, A. A. Plazas, Flavia Sobreira, Jennifer Locke, G. Tarle, I. Sevilla-Noarbe, Lakshay Sharma, M. W. G. Johnson, Santiago Avila, Elisabeth Krause, S. Everett, Francisco J. Castander, M. March, James Annis, Masao Sako, J. Gschwend, Devon L. Hollowood, E. J. Sanchez, D. Brooks, A. Carnero Rosell, M. A. G. Maia, Michael D. Johnson, D. J. Brout, Yanxi Zhang, Santiago Serrano, Juan Garcia-Bellido, National Science Foundation (US), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (US), Department of Energy (US), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España), Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK), University of Illinois, University of Chicago, Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (Brasil), Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional das Fundaçôes Estaduais de Amparo à Pesquisa (Brasil), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brasil), German Research Foundation, University of Pennsylvania, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), European Commission, and Australian Research Council
We present a catalog of 316 trans-Neptunian bodies (TNOs) detected from the first four seasons ("Y4"data) of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The survey covers a contiguous 5000 deg2 of the southern sky in the grizY optical/NIR filter set, with a typical TNO in this part of the sky being targeted by 25-30 Y4 exposures. This paper focuses on the methods used to detect these objects from the ≈60,000 Y4 exposures, a process made challenging by the absence of the few-hour repeat observations employed by TNO-optimized surveys. Newly developed techniques include: transient/moving object detection by comparison of single-epoch catalogs to catalogs of "stacked"images; quantified astrometric error from atmospheric turbulence; new software for detecting TNO linkages in a temporally sparse transient catalog, and for estimating the rate of spurious linkages; use of faint stars to determine the detection efficiency versus magnitude in all exposures. Final validation of the reality of linked orbits uses a new "sub-threshold confirmation"test, wherein we demand the object be detectable in a stack of the exposures in which the orbit indicates an object should be present, but was not individually detected. This catalog contains all validated TNOs which were detected on ≥6 unique nights in the Y4 data, and is complete to r ≲ 23.3 mag with virtually no dependence on orbital properties for bound TNOs at distance 30 au < d < 2500 au. The catalog includes 245 discoveries by DES, 139 not previously published. The final DES TNO catalog is expected to yield >0.3 mag more depth, and arcs of >4 yr for nearly all detections., University of Pennsylvania authors have been supported in this work by grants AST-1515804 and AST-1615555 from the National Science Foundation, and grant DE-SC0007901 from the Department of Energy. Work at University of Michigan is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX17AF21G issued through the SSO Planetary Astronomy Program and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship grant No. DGE 1256260. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, The Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory, National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-66861, FPA2015-68048, SEV2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007- 2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project number CE110001020, and the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) e-Universe (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC). The authors thank Gareth Williams for assistance in the MPC object submission process.