Search for small trans-Neptunian objects by the TAOS project
Abstract
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.
- Publication:
-
Near Earth Objects, our Celestial Neighbors: Opportunity and Risk
- Pub Date:
- May 2007
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:astro-ph/0611527
- Bibcode:
- 2007IAUS..236...65C
- Keywords:
-
- Photometry;
- occultations;
- Trans Neptunian objects;
- comets;
- discovery;
- surveys;
- Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 4 pages, 3 figures, IAU Symposium 236