CHIMERA Occultation Constraints on the Abundance of Kilometer-scale Kuiper Belt Objects
arXiv:2311.04267 · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ad03e3
Abstract
Occultations provide indirect sensitivity to the number density of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) too faint to directly detect telescopically. We present results from the Caltech HI-speed Multicolor camERA (CHIMERA) survey with the Palomar Hale Telescope, which monitored stars over the central 5'x5' of the M22 globular cluster along the ecliptic plane for serendipitous occultations by kilometer-scale KBOs over 63 hr across 24 nights at a 33 Hz frame rate simultaneously in i' and g'. We adapted dense-field photometry and occultation template fitting techniques to this dataset, finding a 95% confidence upper limit on the occultation rate corresponding to an ecliptic sky density of <10^7 deg^-2 of >1 km diameter classical KBOs. We discuss a few of the occultation-like light curve signatures at the edge of the sensitivity limit responsible for setting the upper bounds, and their likely nonviability as true occultations.
arXiv comment13 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; AJ, in press
References in corpus (21)
- SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
- The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
- The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
- Gaia Data Release 3: Summary of the content and survey properties
- Empirical Color Transformations Between SDSS Photometry and Other Photometric Systems
- Toward High-Precision Astrometry with WFPC2. I. Deriving an Accurate PSF
- OSSOS. VII. 800+ trans-Neptunian objects - the complete data release
- Impact Craters on Pluto and Charon Indicate a Deficit of Small Kuiper Belt Objects
- The Size Distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects
- The Size Distribution of Kuiper belt objects for D> 10 km
- Initial Planetesimal Sizes and the Size Distribution of Small Kuiper Belt Objects
- A single sub-km Kuiper Belt object from a stellar Occultation in archival data
- CHIMERA: a wide-field, multi-color, high-speed photometer at the prime focus of the Hale telescope
- Measuring the Abundance of sub-kilometer sized Kuiper Belt Objects using Stellar Occultations
- Amateur telescopes discover a kilometre-sized Kuiper belt object from stellar occultation
- The TAOS Project: Results From Seven Years of Survey Data
- Trans-Neptunian objects found in the first four years of the Dark Energy Survey
- A Search for Occultations of Bright Stars by Small Kuiper Belt Objects using Megacam on the MMT
- Characterisation of Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stellar Photometry
- Broadband lightcurve characteristics of GRBs 980425 and 060218 and comparison with long-lag, wide-pulse GRBs
- A Measurement of the Kuiper Belt's Mean Plane From Objects Classified By Machine Learning