Upper Limits on the Number of Small Bodies in Sedna-Like Orbits by the TAOS Project
J.-H. Wang, M. J. Lehner, Z.-W. Zhang, F. B. Bianco, C. Alcock, W.-P., Chen, T. Axelrod, Y.-I. Byun, N. K. Coehlo, K. H. Cook, R. Dave, I. de Pater,, R. Porrata, D.-W. Kim, S.-K. King, T. Lee, H.-C. Lin, J. J. Lissauer, S. L., Marshall, P. Protopapas, J. A. Rice, M. E. Schwamb
TL;DR
This study used the TAOS survey data to search for occultation events caused by distant small bodies in Sedna-like orbits, setting upper limits on their population based on non-detections.
Contribution
It provides the first constraints on the number of small objects in Sedna-like orbits using a large-scale occultation survey with no detections reported.
Findings
No occultation events detected in the data.
Set upper limits on the number density of objects in Sedna-like orbits.
Provided constraints on the size and distance distribution of distant small bodies.
Abstract
We present the results of a search for occultation events by objects at distances between 100 and 1000 AU in lightcurves from the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS). We searched for consecutive, shallow flux reductions in the stellar lightcurves obtained by our survey between 7 February 2005 and 31 December 2006 with a total of three-telescope simultaneous photometric measurements. No events were detected, allowing us to set upper limits on the number density as a function of size and distance of objects in Sedna-like orbits, using simple models.
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