The Fast Transient Foreground Fog of LSST

Abstract

Studies with 1-m class telescopes have now established that glints from satellites and space debris are the main obstacles to searches for sub-minute optical transients. Here, we report a study of this foreground using observations from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) with the Simonyi 8.4-m telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. From 2,955 pairs of consecutive 30-s exposures, spanning 4,755 deg$^2$ of unique sky area and an area-time coverage of 472 deg$^2$ hr, we identified a population of faint, PSF-like, sub-minute events, including isolated events with no linear sequences of repeated flashes (tracklets) indicative of a tumbling satellite. We extended measurements of this population to the faintest magnitudes yet probed, finding a lower-bound to the occurrence rate of $(9.55 \pm 0.14) \times10^6\,$sky$^{-1}\,$day$^{-1}$ to $\sim23$ mag (median of $\sim22.3$ mag). The large aperture of the Simonyi 8.4-m telescope provides an additional discriminator: orbital debris in low-Earth orbit are sufficiently out of focus that they are filtered out. We find that, for a $1^{\prime\prime}$ PSF, unresolved events are constrained to distances beyond 1,732 km, and identify a previously unreported population of glints consistent with medium-Earth-orbit altitudes with estimated sizes of order $\sim1$-3 mm. We also report two isolated events observed along sight lines deep within the Earth's shadow, for which a sunlit-debris origin is disfavored. The scant evidence is consistent with an eclipsing binary and a stellar flare. The robust way forward for sub-minute transients is simultaneous observations of the same field by two (or more) widely separated telescopes. The resulting measurement of parallax will cleanly eliminate local (primarily orbital) debris, clarifying the nature of this transient foreground. This understanding will help astronomers probe truly celestial optical bursts.