Photometry of Outer Solar System Objects from the Dark Energy Survey. II. A Joint Analysis of Trans-Neptunian Absolute Magnitudes, Colors, Light Curves and Dynamics

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© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

Contribution Statements. P.H.B. led the analysis, developed the GMM algorithm, implemented the numerical calculations and produced the figures and results. G.M.B. derived the likelihood form and produced the initial HMC code. P.H.B. and G.M.B. contributed equally to the text. The remaining authors have made contributions to this paper that include, but are not limited to, the construction of DECam and other aspects of collecting the data; data processing and calibration; developing broadly used methods, codes, and simulations; running the pipelines and validation tests; and promoting the science analysis.

Software: This work made use of the following public libraries: Numpy (T. E. Oliphant 2015), SciPy (E. Jones et al. 2001), Astropy (The Astropy Collaboration 2013, 2018, 2022), Matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), IPython (F. Pérez & B. E. Granger 2007), Numba (S. K. Lam et al. 2015), Jax (J. Bradbury et al. 2018), SymPy (A. Meurer et al. 2017), Rebound and WHFast (H. Rein & S.-F. Liu 2012; H. Rein & D. Tamayo 2015), GetDist (A. Lewis 2019), mpltern (Y. Ikeda 2023).

We thank B. Proudfoot and D. Ragozzine for discussions related to the Haumea family, J.J. Kavelaars for discussions about the OSSOS absolute-magnitude distribution, M. Belyakov for discussions about the color distribution results, and H.W. Lin for a thorough review of this manuscript prior to submission.

P.H.B. acknowledges support from the DIRAC Institute in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. The DIRAC Institute is supported through generous gifts from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, and the Washington Research Foundation. G.M.B. acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-1515804 and AST-2205808 during the course of this work.

This work used Anvil at Purdue University (X. C. Song et al. 2022) through allocation PHY240190 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS; T. J. Boerner et al. 2023) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296

Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the US Department of Energy, the US 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 Urbana-Champaign, 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 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.

This work is based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American 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 grants No. AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-66861, FPA2015-68048, SEV-2016-0588, 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 No. CE110001020, and the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) e-Universe (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2).

This manuscript has been authored by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the US 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.