UPPER LIMITS ON THE NUMBER OF SMALL BODIES IN SEDNA-LIKE ORBITS

doi:10.1088/0004-6256/138/6/1893

UPPER LIMITS ON THE NUMBER OF SMALL BODIES IN SEDNA-LIKE ORBITS BY THE TAOS PROJECT

J.-H. Wang et al 2009 The Astronomical Journal 138 1893-1901 doi: 10.1088/0004-6256/138/6/1893

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J.-H. Wang^1,2, M. J. Lehner^1,3,4, Z.-W. Zhang², F. B. Bianco^3,4, C. Alcock⁴, W.-P. Chen², T. Axelrod⁵, Y.-I. Byun⁶, N. K. Coehlo⁷, K. H. Cook⁸, R. Dave⁴, I. de Pater⁹, R. Porrata⁹, D.-W. Kim⁶, S.-K. King¹, T. Lee¹, H.-C. Lin², J. J. Lissauer¹⁰, S. L. Marshall^8,11, P. Protopapas⁴, J. A. Rice⁷, M. E. Schwamb¹², S.-Y. Wang¹ and C.-Y. Wen¹
¹ Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica. P.O. Box 23-141, Taipei 106, Taiwan
² Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, No. 300, Jhongda Rd, Jhongli City, Taoyuan County 320, Taiwan
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 209 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
⁴ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
⁵ Steward Observatory, 933 North Cherry Avenue, Room N204, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
⁶ Department of Astronomy, Yonsei University, 134 Shinchon, Seoul 120-749, Republic of Korea
⁷ Department of Statistics, University of California Berkeley, 367 Evans Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
⁸ Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA
⁹ Department of Astronomy, University of California Berkeley, 601 Campbell Hall, Berkeley CA 94720, USA
¹⁰ Space Science and Astrobiology Division 245-3, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA
¹¹ Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, 2575 Sand Hill Road, MS 29, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
¹² Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, 1201 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
E-mail: jhwang@asiaa.sinica.edu.tw

ABSTRACT. We present the results of a search for occultation events by objects at distances between 100 and 1000 AU in light curves from the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey. We searched for consecutive, shallow flux reductions in the stellar light curves obtained by our survey between 2005 February 7 and 2006 December 31 with a total of ~4.5 × 10⁹ three-telescope simultaneous photometric measurements. No events were detected, allowing us to set upper limits on the number density as a function of size and distance of objects in Sedna-like orbits, using simple models.

Key words: Kuiper Belt; occultations; solar system: formation

Print publication: Issue 6 (2009 December)
Received 2009 February 28, accepted for publication 2009 October 4
Published 2009 November 5

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UPPER LIMITS ON THE NUMBER OF SMALL BODIES IN SEDNA-LIKE ORBITS BY THE TAOS PROJECT

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