When at the earliest could we identify a new big dwarf planet ? (This fall already !?!) 😼

Science
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I’ve seen in Rubin Observatory Plans for an Early
Science Program RTN-011 Section 3.3 Data Preview 2 :
DRP Solar System Processing (SSP) is currently a stretch goal for DP2. DRP SSP is intended to be a Rubin-only product; meaning that It does not start with the catalog from the Minor Planets Center (MPC).

As you may not know, I am from the public amateur beginner passionate by “giant dwarf planets”.
Funny term isn’t it ?
 Yes, in my point of view the “non-giant” dwarf planets (so the regular ones like Haumea, MakeMake, Gonggong, etc.) should not be included in this category of “Dwarf Planets” (where belong, IMO, only Pluto and Eris for the moment), but in a different category of “Giant Asteroids” (don’t ask me why
)

Because of the confusion on knowing exactly what is a planet or not, then we could easily imagine that the actual criteria could be not accurate
 And perhaps, in the future we could realise that the true criteria could be others


Imagine we would discover that there is a kind of a new mathematic démonstration that shows that to be a planet you should have a size bigger than 1800km. Then the Vera Rubin could easily discover new TRUE planets !

And like this Mike Brown would be happy to learn that he is the discoverer of a true planet (Éris) and not anymore just the miserable killer of Pluto and he would be winning with this upgrade !

So it could be of major importance for the Rubin to discover new dwarf planets 
and not only the hypothetical Brown’s Planet 9 (him again) that doesn’t exist IMAO
(again, don’t ask me why
 but more and more new discoveries tend to confirm my opinion : (2017) OSSOS VI, (2020) Napier & Gerdes, (2025) 2023KQ14, etc.) (And let’s not forget another one’s opinion, the one of the great master David Jewitt, who thinks it’s all wishful thinking
)

Knowing that new dwarf planets would be in majority located around the ecliptic plane, then the SV survey could very well find some (as the SV Survey coverage is mostly the région of the ecliptic (half of it ! : 180 degrees from Scorpio to Aries !)

But!
 when will we know about it ?
I imagine that after the detection there must be a Timelapse until we identify its size.
And there is that pipeline process : alarm, brokers, sending to MPC, etc.

But it seems from what I read that with the SV Survey it will be different : 
“meaning that It does not start with the catalog from the Minor Planets Center (MPC)”.

So anyone @bechtol @ljones @leanne or others could tell me when and how I could be informed at the earliest that we have identified a new big dwarf planet (only the ones bigger than 1500 km ! So there will be very few !) thanks to the SV Survey ?? (I think we shouldn’t find more than 2 or 3 TNOs bigger than 1500km with the Rubin
 So with only the half of the ecliptic (180 deg) and only 10 deg DEC, we should find no more than 1 with the SV Survey
)

Please let me know what will happen next about that topic ! :pray: If there’s no transmission to the MPC then what are my possibilities to know about an identification of a dwarf planet during the SV Survey ??
:face_with_diagonal_mouth: : I am not professional and don’t have access to the Rubin Science Platform


Should I be asking someone or somewhere each month or even better is there someone who could inform me each month about new identified dwarf planets>1500km ?
:hugs:

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2025-08-01 On-sky Commissioning Update
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Seconded. I am also interested in these objects.

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Yes, me too. Interesting I’m not in the field, but it is just interesting to me. You have a wonderful day. I would gladly read whatever you have to share. Thank you again.

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Hi @Rabu,

Thanks for your enthusiasm on new dwarf planets! I’ve moved this thread out of our News category and into the Science category, which is the better place for scientific discussions.

Detections by Rubin of all moving objects do go to the Minor Planet Center (MPC). The discovery and confirmation of a big new dwarf planet would be announced with at least a journal publication – similar to the recent publication announcing Rubin observations of the interstellar comet (Chandler et al. 2025).

An accompanying press release and broad advertising would also be likely. So you might even hear about it in the media.

You mention you’re not a professional and don’t have access to the RSP, and that’s ok, as that’s not where announcements happen. Continue to watch the News category here in the Rubin Community Forum, and in addition you might be interested to subscribe and get notifications about new journal articles on topics that interest you: Email subscriptions for new papers - arXiv info.

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There are a couple of confusions here:

  • The DRP solar system pipeline (SSP) is an independent rubin-only product in that it includes observations from Rubin only, in order to be able to build the science products that let us estimate overall populations and size distributions. That does not mean that discoveries in DRP would not be reported to the MPC.

  • Solar System objects will be discovered and linked daily, outside of the DRP, in a separate stage of processing. These databases are useful for following things “live” but are less useful for the population studies I mentioned above, because they also incorporate information from other telescopes (by way of including information from the MPC). This gives us the best chance of getting good orbits to follow things “live” – and is where any new discoveries of the sort you’re interested in will be seen first. These daily processing runs do report back to the MPC, as promptly as possible.

The daily processing will happen as soon as it can.
However, we are a new observatory and we are still gathering data on how well our pipelines work, and also gathering the data we need to do the more complicated processing that SSP needs in order to run. After all, we can’t just find objects in an image without a comparison image to know what was holding still and what was moving – so we need enough comparison images first.

When will you know if we found a new dwarf planet? – this is a bit more complicated and the answer is nobody knows for sure yet. We have to make sure we have enough comparison images; we have to make sure our pipelines are running reliably at the scale that is necessary for a “Rubin-sized” survey; and we then have to make sure we’ve done all of our quality control to release a reliable product. Once we have those pieces in place, we will be sending information to the MPC.

You will know as soon as possible, and it won’t be later than next fall but it will be much more likely to be closer to this fall.

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Since dwarf planets interest you Bu Ra, you may wish to explore the discovery of a new very distant object.

TNO 2023 KQ14 discovery was recently announced in MPEC 2025-G128 : 2023 KQ14
Several observatories were involved: 807 Cerro Tololo Observatory, La Serena, T09 Subaru Telescope, Maunakea, and T14 Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Maunakea with their large apertures to reach 25th magnitude.

The absolute magnitude H =6.81 of 2023 KQ14 is much larger implying much smaller size than Dwarf Planets Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.

2023 KQ14 initial reported observation by Subaru Telescope, Maunakea on 2023-May-16

The discovery was published on July 14, 2025, in Nature Astronomy:
Ying-Tung Chen et al., Discovery and dynamics of a Sedna-like object with a perihelion of 66 au
arxiv preview (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02162)
section 2.3 discusses “Interaction with a hypothetical planet”

There are press releases posted" Astronomers Discover New Distant Object “Ammonite,”
Unveiling Mysteries of Solar System’s Outer Frontier", Released: 15th July, 2025, Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics (ASIAA), Taiwan

which notes: "Challenges the Existence of Planet Nine"

and https://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/AmmoniteJul2025/
Ammonite: a Newly Discovered Distant Object that Hints at our Solar System’s Past
which notes: "orbit does not align with those of the other Sedna-like objects and fills the previously unexplained ‘q-gap’ in the observed distribution of distant solar system objects. "

Thanks so much for expressing your interest here.

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For Bu Ra: On the Detectability of Planet X with LSST

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Me too !

It looks like very soon (in October/November) we will assist to a big fireworks with all these new dwarf planets and maybe Planet 9 ? And Planet 10 ? Why not !

Big surprises to come.