A Targeted Search for Planet Nine with TESS

The observed orbital geometry of extreme trans-Neptunian objects has provided intriguing evidence suggesting the existence of an as-yet undiscovered “Planet Nine” in the distant solar system. If it exists, Planet Nine will revolutionize current theories of the solar system’s evolution. We present results from a targeted search for Planet Nine using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Our survey is designed to discover outer solar system objects below the TESS single-frame detection limit by shifting and stacking TESS full-frame images along all plausible orbits of interest. Injection tests and neural networks are leveraged to quantify the limiting magnitude of our search in each segment of the sky. We focus on the region of the sky in which statistical models have suggested that Planet Nine is most likely to reside.