Final night (of 7!) at the @SubaruTelescope . Once again a spectacular looking one. I haven't had 7 nights of good data in a row since, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, ever? My feeling is that *if* we are going to find Planet Nine with Subaru these are the data in which we will find it.
This week's data covers something like the ~85% confidence region of where we think Planet Nine is (except for the region of the Milky Way galaxy, which we'll talk about later).
If P9 is in the region we have surveyed, I'd say we have a 90-95% chance of detecting it. 5-10% of the time it might be too close to a star and we miss it. But we are trying hard to prevent that problem by looking on multiple nights.
My biggest fear, though, is the Milky Way galaxy. There are SO MANY stars that we tend to avoid even looking there. But our predicted region goes through the Milky Way. So we are going to have to deal. We're testing a little of that this week,
but we will be back in February to really beat hard on the Milky Way. Perhaps by using some more sophisticated image analysis techniques we'll be able to pick out P9 in a sea of star. (perhaps we won't have to because we found it already!)
What happens if we don't find it? Overall, if our predictions are right, I'd say we are 80% certain of success. 80% is smaller than I like, but filling in that last 20% would take many many many more nights on the telescope. So perhaps if we don't find it we were just unlucky.
What if we're just wrong, though? I have few doubts that something like the predicted P9 exists (see new paper coming out in January for the 99.8% confidence level statistics....), but there is always the chance that we are missing something in predicting where it should be.
Last week @kbatygin and I spent a lot of time discussing what could possibly go wrong with the predictions. We have some new ideas to try, though we are not convinced they'll change anything. IT SHOULD BE WHERE WE SAY. ahem.
So that's where we stand. With the absurdly good data from this week we have a serious shot. It's just going to now take some time to sort through it all (for example: I didn't expect to get so much data; need new disks drives.....). Stay tuned!
