Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Sep 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...208.7603b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #208, #76.03
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
1
Scientific paper
We report the results of a search for km-sized Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) using the method of serendipitous stellar occcultations. Photometric time-series were obtained at 40 Hz at the Dominion Astrophyical Observatory (DAO) in Victoria, British Columbia. We have analysed data totalling 6.5 star-hours for target stars in the ecliptic open cluster M35, and 3.4 star-hours for control stars in the off-ecliptic open cluster M34. We detect zero viable candidate occultation events and therefore find an upper limit on the cumulative surface density of 2.7x10^10 deg^-2 (95% confidence) for KBOs larger than 500 m in diameter.
Artificial occultation events were added to the data to evaluate how effectively they could be recovered by our analysis method and thereby to establish our limiting detectable size. We have also worked extensively to model diffraction-dominated occultations and examine their detectability in artificial time-series to establish the rates of false-positives. These simulated time-series were generated to reproduce the 1/f power-spectra of our real data as this better represents the noise introduced by scintillation effects.
Bickerton Steven J.
Kavelaars John J.
Welch Dean L.
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