Pencil-Beam Surveys for Trans-Neptunian Objects: Limits on Distant Populations
arXiv:1004.3288 · doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.04.018
Abstract
Two populations of minor bodies in the outer Solar System remain particularly elusive: Scattered Disk objects and Sedna-like objects. These populations are important dynamical tracers, and understanding the details of their spatial- and size-distributions will enhance our understanding of the formation and on-going evolution of the Solar System. By using newly-derived limits on the maximum heliocentric distances that recent pencil-beam surveys for Trans-Neptunian Objects were sensitive to, we determine new upper limits on the total numbers of distant SDOs and Sedna-like objects. While generally consistent with populations estimated from wide-area surveys, we show that for magnitude-distribution slopes of α > 0.7-1.0, these pencil-beam surveys provide stronger upper limits than current estimates in literature.
Submitted to Icarus
References in corpus (11)
- LSST Science Book, Version 2.0
- The Size Distribution of Trans-Neptunian Bodies
- The Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey - Full Data Release: The orbital structure of the Kuiper belt
- Stellar encounters as the origin of distant solar system objects in highly eccentric orbits
- The Scattered Disk as the source of the Jupiter Family comets
- The Size Distribution of Kuiper belt objects for D> 10 km
- The Kuiper Belt Luminosity Function from m(R)=21 to 26
- A Subaru Pencil-beam Search for m_R~27 Trans-neptunian bodies
- A Search for Distant Solar System Bodies in the Region of Sedna
- Pencil-Beam Surveys for Trans-Neptunian Objects: Novel Methods for Optimization and Characterization
- Upper Limits on the Number of Small Bodies in Sedna-Like Orbits by the TAOS Project