Photometry of Outer Solar System Objects from the Dark Energy Survey. I. Photometric Methods, Light-curve Distributions, and Trans-Neptunian Binaries

We report the methods of and initial scientific inferences from the extraction of precision photometric information for the $>800$ trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) discovered in the images of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Scene-modelling photometry is used to obtain shot-noise-limited flux measures for each exposure of each TNO, with background sources subtracted. Comparison of double-source fits to the pixel data with single-source fits are used to identify and characterize two binary TNO systems. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo method samples the joint likelihood of the intrinsic colors of each source as well as the amplitude of its flux variation, given the time series of multiband flux measurements and their uncertainties. A catalog of these colors and light curve amplitudes $A$ is included with this publication. We show how to assign a likelihood to the distribution $q(A)$ of light curve amplitudes in any subpopulation. Using this method, we find decisive evidence (i.e. evidence ratio $<0.01$) that cold classical (CC) TNOs with absolute magnitude $6