A Search for Occultations of Bright Stars by Small Kuiper Belt Objects using Megacam on the MMT

Abstract

We conducted a search for occultations of bright stars by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) to estimate the density of sub-km KBOs in the sky. We report here the first results of this occultation survey of the outer solar system conducted in June 2007 and June/July 2008 at the MMT Observatory using Megacam, the large MMT optical imager. We used Megacam in a novel shutterless continuous--readout mode to achieve high precision photometry at 200 Hz. We present an analysis of 220 star hours at signal-to-noise ratio of 25 or greater. The survey efficiency is greater than 10% for occultations by KBOs of diameter d>=0.7 km, and we report no detections in our dataset. We set a new 95% confidence level upper limit for the surface density Σ_N(d) of KBOs larger than 1 km: Σ_N(d>=1 km) <= 2.0e8 deg^-2, and for KBOs larger than 0.7 km Σ_N(d>= 0.7 km) <= 4.8e8 deg^-2.

13 pages, 12 figures, submitted to AJ, modified fig 11 that did now display properly

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