Search for Small Trans-Neptunian Objects by the TAOS Project
The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have been installed at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan to simultaneously monitor some thousand of stars for such rare occultation events. Because a typical occultation event by a TNO a few km across will last for only a fraction of a second, fast photometry is necessary. A special CCD readout scheme has been devised to allow for stellar photometry taken a few times per second. Effective analysis pipelines have been developed to process stellar light curves and to correlate any possible flux changes among all telescopes. A few billion photometric measurements have been collected since the routine survey began in early 2005. Our preliminary result of a very low detection rate suggests a deficit of small TNOs down to a few km size, consistent with the extrapolation of some recent studies of larger (30-100 km) TNOs.
- Research Organization:
- SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-76SF00515
- OSTI ID:
- 896172
- Report Number(s):
- SLAC-PUB-12216; astro-ph/0611527; TRN: US200703%%524
- Journal Information:
- Submitted to IAU Symp., Conference: To appear in the proceedings of IAU Symposium 236: Near Earth Objects, our Celestial Neighbors: Opportunity and Risk, Prague, Czech Republic, 14-18 Aug 2006
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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