Occultation Searches for Kuiper Belt Objects

Abstract

The occultation of background stellar sources by foreground Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) can be used to survey physical properties of the KBO population. We discuss statistics related to a KBO occultation survey, such as the event duration distribution, and suggest that occultation searches can be effectively used to probe the KBO size distribution below 10 km. In particular, we suggest that occultation surveys may be best suited to search for a turnover radius in the KBO size distribution due to collisions between small-size objects. For occultation surveys that monitor stellar sources near the ecliptic over a few square degrees, with time sampling intervals of order 0.1 sec and sensitivity to flux variations of a few percent or more, a turnover radius between 0.1 and 1.0 km can be probed. While occultation surveys will probe the low-radius limit and imaging surveys will detect KBOs of size 100 km or more, statistics of objects with sizes in the intermediate range of around 1 km to 100 km will likely remain unattainable.

4 pages, 3 figures; ApJL submitted

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Detectability of Occultation of Stars by Objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud
• The TAOS Project: Results From Seven Years of Survey Data
• A Search for sub-km KBOs with the Method of Serendipitous Stellar Occultations
• 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 Sizes and Distances from Occultation Observations
• Millisecond dip events in the 2007 RXTE/PCA data of Sco X-1 and the TNO size distribution
• Kuiper Belt Object Occultations: Expected Rates, False Positives, and Survey Design
• Stellar occultations by Trans-Neptunian Objects
• 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
• Kepler and the Kuiper Belt