Dr. Katherine Volk

So after LSST has been in operation for a couple years, so probably mid-2020s, this map will then look like this, where almost all of this region has been imaged to 24 and a half magnitude is kind of their target for Kuiper Belt detections.

And they estimate something like 10,000 to 40,000 new Kuiper Belt objects from the LSST search fields.

So we have 1,500 with good orbits now.

So it's going to be a huge boost to the Kuiper Belt community.

And of course, it's going to 24 and 1 half.

So if there are really big, bright things out there in these parts of the fields, LSST will find it.

And they're going to be revisiting these areas in the sky on a regular basis over years.

So even things that are really distant and therefore moving very slowly,

So maybe you don't see the motion in one night.

Maybe you don't even see the motion in a week.

But you can go back and look and say, oh, on this course of a month, it actually is moving.

So that's going to be huge.

Of course, it's not going to be the whole sky.

But there are lots of things like the Planet 9 search going on in the Northern Hemisphere.

And the Northern Hemisphere is the one we've searched better anyway.

So that's going to be a huge game changer both for large objects and on the chance that there are large objects not in the LSST fields, instead of having 160 things to work with, should have thousands and thousands in the distant Kuiper Belt to work with.

So if these gravitational effects that we think we're seeing are real, they should stand out so much better in the LSST data.

There's a lot of also people going through archival data.

So of course, not every image of the night sky is taken for the purposes of looking for solar system stuff.

There's people doing all sorts of other outside of the solar system astronomy.