All Bright Cold Classical KBOs are Binary

When sorted by absolute magnitude as seen in ground based observations, an extremely high fraction of the brightest Cold Classical (CC) Kuiper Belt objects (KBO) are, in fact resolved as binaries when observed at higher angular resolution. Of the 22 CCs brighter than H=6.1 observed by HST, 16 have been found to be binary yielding a binary fraction of 73±10%. When low inclination interlopers from the hot population and close binaries are considered, this very high fraction is consistent with 100% of bright CCs being binary. At fainter absolute magnitudes, this fraction drops to ~20%. Such a situation is a natural outcome of a broken size distribution with a steep drop-off in the number of CCs with individual component diameters larger than 150 km (for an assumed albedo of 0.15). A sharp cutoff in the size distribution for CCs is consistent with formation models that suggest that most planetesimals form at a preferred modal size of order 100 km.The very high fraction of binaries among the largest CCs also serves to limit the separation distribution of KBO binaries. At most, 27% of the brightest CCs are possible unresolved binaries. The apparent power law distribution of binary separation must cut off near the current observational limits of HST ( 1800 km at 43 AU). It is worth noting, however, that this observation does not constrain how many components of resolved binaries may themselves be unresolved multiples like 47171 1999 TC36. Finally, it is important to point out that, when sorted by the size of the primary rather than absolute magnitude of the unresolved pair, the fraction of binaries is relatively constant with size (Nesvorny et al. 2011, AJ 141, 159) eliminating observational bias as cause of the pile up of binaries among the brightest Cold Classical Kuiper Belt objects.The very high fraction of binaries among the brightest CCs appears to be an effect of the underlying CC size distribution.