The TAOS Project: Results From Seven Years of Survey Data

Abstract

The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to detect serendipitous occultations of stars by small (about 1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (<0.001 events per star per year) and short in duration (about 200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence. TAOS monitors typically around 500 stars simultaneously at a 5 Hz readout cadence with four telescopes located at Lulin Observatory in central Taiwan. In this paper, we report the results of the search for small Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) in seven years of data. No occultation events were found, resulting in a 95% c.l. upper limit on the slope of the faint end of the KBO size distribution of q = 3.34 to 3.82, depending on the surface density at the break in the size distribution at a diameter of about 90 km.

11 pages, 9 figures. Submitted to Astronomical Journal 2013 January 16

References in corpus (15)

• 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
• Rapid Formation of Icy Super-Earths and the Cores of Gas Giant Planets
• Measuring the Abundance of sub-kilometer sized Kuiper Belt Objects using Stellar Occultations
• 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
• Revisiting the parametrization of Equation of State of Dark Energy via SNIa Data
• 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
• Production of Millisecond Dips in Sco X-1 Count Rates by Dead Time Effects
• Search for serendipitous TNO occultation in X-rays

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