The TAOS Project: Upper Bounds on the Population of Small KBOs and Tests of Models of Formation and Evolution of the Outer Solar System

Autor:	Bianco, F. B., Zhang, Z. -W., Lehner, M. J., Mondal, S., King, S. -K., Giammarco, J., Holman, M. J., Coehlo, N. K., Wang, J. -H., Alcock, C., Axelrod, T., Byun, Y. -I., Chen, W. P., Cook, K. H., Dave, R., de Pater, I., Kim, D. -W., Lee, T., Lin, H. -C., Lissauer, J. J., Marshall, S. L., Protopapas, P., Rice, J. A., Schwamb, M. E., Wang, S. -Y., Wen, C. -Y.
Rok vydání:	2010
Předmět:	Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Zdroj:	2010 The Astronomical Journal 139 1499
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
DOI:	10.1088/0004-6256/139/4/1499
Popis:	We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from TAOS, the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey. TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). This dataset comprises 5e5 star-hours of multi-telescope photometric data taken at 4 or 5 Hz. No events consistent with KBO occultations were found in this dataset. We compute the number of events expected for the Kuiper Belt formation and evolution models of Pan & Sari (2005), Kenyon & Bromley (2004), Benavidez & Campo Bagatin (2009), and Fraser (2009). A comparison with the upper limits we derive from our data constrains the parameter space of these models. This is the first detailed comparison of models of the KBO size distribution with data from an occultation survey. Our results suggest that the KBO population is comprised of objects with low internal strength and that planetary migration played a role in the shaping of the size distribution. Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, Aj submitted
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.2006 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv