SEARCHING FOR SUB-KILOMETER TRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECTS USING PAN-STARRS VIDEO MODE LIGHT CURVES: PRELIMINARY STUDY AND EVALUATION USING ENGINEERING DATA

Journal Article · Sat May 15 00:00:00 EDT 2010 · Astronomical Journal (New York, N.Y. Online)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-6256/139/5/2003· OSTI ID:21443114

Wang, J -H ^[1]; Protopapas, P; Alcock, C R ^[2]; Chen, W -P ^[3]; Burgett, W S; Morgan, J S; Price, P A; Tonry, J L ^[4]; Dombeck, T ^[5]; Grav, T ^[6]

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1. Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, P.O. Box 23-141, Taipei 106, Taiwan (China)
2. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
3. Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, No. 300, Jhongda Road, Jhongli City, Taoyuan County 320, Taiwan (China)
4. Physics Department, University of Hawaii, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
5. Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
6. Department of Physics and Astronomy, John Hopkins University, 366 Bloomberg Center, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)

We present a pre-survey study of using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) high sampling rate video mode guide star images to search for trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Guide stars are primarily used by Pan-STARRS to compensate for image motion and hence improve the point-spread function. With suitable selection of the guide stars within the Pan-STARRS 7 deg{sup 2} field of view, the light curves of these guide stars can also be used to search for occultations by TNOs. The best target stars for this purpose are stars with high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and small angular size. In order to do this, we compiled a catalog using the S/N calculated from stars with m{sub V} < 13 mag in the Tycho2 catalog, then cross matched these stars with the Two Micron All Sky Survey catalog, and estimated their angular sizes from (V - K) color. We also outlined a new detection method based on matched filter that is optimized to search for diffraction patterns in the light curves due to occultation by sub-kilometer TNOs. A detection threshold is set to compromise between real detections and false positives. Depending on the theoretical size distribution model used, we expect to find up to a hundred events during the three-year lifetime of the Pan-STARRS-1 project. The high sampling (30 Hz) of the project facilitates detections of small objects (as small as 400 m), which are numerous according to power-law size distribution, and thus allows us to verify various models and further constrain our understanding of the structure in the outer reach of the solar system. We have tested the detection algorithm and the pipeline on a set of engineering data (taken at 10 Hz instead of 30 Hz). No events were found within the engineering data, which is consistent with the small size of the data set and the theoretical models. Meanwhile, with a total of {approx}22 star-hours video mode data (|{beta}| < 10{sup 0}), we are able to set an upper limit of N(>0.5 km) {approx} 2.47 x 10{sup 10} deg{sup -2} at 95% confidence limit.

• OSTI ID: 21443114
• Journal Information: Astronomical Journal (New York, N.Y. Online), Vol. 139, Issue 5; Other Information: DOI: 10.1088/0004-6256/139/5/2003; ISSN 1538-3881
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ALGORITHMS
COLOR
DIFFRACTION
ECLIPSE
EVALUATION
IMAGES
PLANETS
SATELLITES
SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO
SOLAR SYSTEM
STARS
TELESCOPES
COHERENT SCATTERING
DIMENSIONLESS NUMBERS
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
OPTICAL PROPERTIES
ORGANOLEPTIC PROPERTIES
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
SCATTERING