The TAOS Project: Upper Bounds on the Population of Small KBOs and Tests of Models of Formation and Evolution of the Outer Solar System

Abstract

We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from TAOS, the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey. TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). This dataset comprises 5e5 star-hours of multi-telescope photometric data taken at 4 or 5 Hz. No events consistent with KBO occultations were found in this dataset. We compute the number of events expected for the Kuiper Belt formation and evolution models of Pan & Sari (2005), Kenyon & Bromley (2004), Benavidez & Campo Bagatin (2009), and Fraser (2009). A comparison with the upper limits we derive from our data constrains the parameter space of these models. This is the first detailed comparison of models of the KBO size distribution with data from an occultation survey. Our results suggest that the KBO population is comprised of objects with low internal strength and that planetary migration played a role in the shaping of the size distribution.

18 pages, 16 figures, Aj submitted

References in corpus (14)

• The Scattered Disk as the source of the Jupiter Family comets
• The Size Distribution of Kuiper belt objects for D> 10 km
• A single sub-km Kuiper Belt object from a stellar Occultation in archival data
• Coupling dynamical and collisional evolution of small bodies II : Forming the Kuiper Belt, the Scattered Disk and the Oort Cloud
• Detectability of Occultation of Stars by Objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud
• The Collisional Divot in the Kuiper belt Size Distribution
• A Search for sub-km KBOs with the Method of Serendipitous Stellar Occultations
• Revisiting the parametrization of Equation of State of Dark Energy via SNIa Data
• A Search for Occultations of Bright Stars by Small Kuiper Belt Objects using Megacam on the MMT
• A Derivation of the Luminosity Function of the Kuiper Belt from a Broken Power-Law Size Distribution
• The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey: The Multi-Telescope Robotic Observatory
• Millisecond dips in the RXTE/PCA light curve of Sco X-1 and TNO occultation
• First Results From The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS)
• Kuiper Belt Object Occultations: Expected Rates, False Positives, and Survey Design

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Initial Planetesimal Sizes and the Size Distribution of Small Kuiper Belt Objects
• Self-consistent size and velocity distributions of collisional cascades
• An improved model of the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk
• Measuring the Abundance of sub-kilometer sized Kuiper Belt Objects using Stellar Occultations
• Runaway Growth During Planet Formation: Explaining the Size Distribution of Large Kuiper Belt Objects
• Coagulation Calculations of Icy Planet Formation at 15--150 AU: A Correlation Between the Maximum Radius and the Slope of the Size Distribution for Transneptunian Objects
• The TAOS Project: Results From Seven Years of Survey Data
• Planetesimals in Debris Disks of Sun-like Stars
• Collisional Evolution of Ultra-Wide Trans-Neptunian Binaries
• Forming the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt in a light Disk
• Organized Autotelescopes for Serendipitous Event Survey (OASES): design and performance
• Millisecond dips in the 2007-2009 RXTE/PCA lightcurve of Sco X-1 and one possible occultation event
• A Pluto-Charon Sonata: The Dynamical Architecture of the Circumbinary Satellite System
• On the Use of Cherenkov Telescopes for Outer Solar System Body Occultations
• Search for serendipitous TNO occultation in X-rays
• Stability of the Outer Planets in Multiresonant Configurations with a Self-gravitating Planetesimal Disk
• The TAOS Project Stellar Variability II. Detection of 15 Variable Stars
• Microwave Emission from the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt and the Asteroid Belt Constrained from WMAP
• The Contribution of Dwarf Planets to the Origin of Low Inclination Comets by the Replenishment of Mean Motion Resonances in Debris Disks