| Summary: | In support of studies of decadal-timescale evolution of outer solar system
atmospheres and ring systems, we present detailed Earth-based stellar
occultation predictions for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Titan, and Triton
for 2023–2050, based on the Gaia Data Release 3 star catalog and near-IR K -band photometry from the Two Micron All Sky Survey
catalog. We tabulate the number of observable events by year and magnitude
interval, reflecting the highly variable frequency of high-signal-to-noise ratio
(S/N) events depending on the target’s path relative to the star-rich regions of
the Milky Way. We identify regions on Earth where each event is potentially
observable, and for atmospheric occultations we determine the latitude of the
ingress and egress events. For Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, we also compute the
predicted ring occultation event times. We present representative subsets of the
predicted events and highlight particularly promising events. Jupiter
occultations with K ≤ 7 occur at a cadence of
about one per year, with bright events at higher frequency in 2031 and 2043.
Saturn occultations are much rarer, with only two predicted events with K ≤ 5 in 2032 and 2047. Ten Uranus ring occultations
are predicted with K ≤ 10 for the period
2023–2050. Neptune traverses star-poor regions of the sky until 2068, resulting
in only 13 predicted occultations for K ≤ 12
between 2023 and 2050. Titan has several high-S/N events between 2029 and 2031,
whereas Triton is limited to a total of 22 occultations with K ≤ 15 between 2023 and 2050. Details of all predicted
events are included in the Supplementary Online Material.
|
|---|
