Kuiper Belt Object Occultations: Expected Rates, False Positives, and Survey Design

Abstract

A novel method of generating artificial scintillation noise is developed and used to evaluate occultation rates and false positive rates for surveys probing the Kuiper Belt with the method of serendipitous stellar occultations. A thorough examination of survey design shows that: (1) diffraction-dominated occultations are critically (Nyquist) sampled at a rate of 2 Fsu^{-1}, corresponding to 40 s^{-1} for objects at 40 AU, (2) occultation detection rates are maximized when targets are observed at solar opposition, (3) Main Belt Asteroids will produce occultations lightcurves identical to those of Kuiper Belt Objects if target stars are observed at solar elongations of: 116 deg < epsilon < 125 deg, or 131 deg < epsilon < 141 deg, and (4) genuine KBO occultations are likely to be so rare that a detection threshold of >7-8 sigma should be adopted to ensure that viable candidate events can be disentangled from false positives.

Accepted AJ, 12 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (10)

• The Size Distribution of Trans-Neptunian Bodies
• Shaping the Kuiper belt size spectrum by shattering large but strengthless bodies
• The Size Distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects
• The Size Distribution of Kuiper belt objects for D> 10 km
• Detectability of Occultation of Stars by Objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud
• A Search for sub-km KBOs with the Method of Serendipitous Stellar Occultations
• Occultation Searches for Kuiper Belt Objects
• First Results From The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS)
• Kuiper Belt Object Sizes and Distances from Occultation Observations
• Kepler and the Kuiper Belt

Cited by in corpus (8)

• The TAOS Project: Results From Seven Years of Survey Data
• A Search for Occultations of Bright Stars by Small Kuiper Belt Objects using Megacam on the MMT
• The TAOS Project: Upper Bounds on the Population of Small KBOs and Tests of Models of Formation and Evolution of the Outer Solar System
• Searching for sub-kilometer TNOs using Pan-STARRS video mode lightcurves: Preliminary study and evaluation using engineering data
• Stellar occultations by Trans-Neptunian Objects
• Millisecond dips in the 2007-2009 RXTE/PCA lightcurve of Sco X-1 and one possible occultation event
• Pipeline for the Detection of Serendipitous Stellar Occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects with the Colibri Fast-Photometry Array
• On the Use of Cherenkov Telescopes for Outer Solar System Body Occultations