Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.3602s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #36.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.461
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We have pursued in 2008 our observing program of stellar occultations by Pluto and its satellites. This program started in 2002, and revealed a two-fold increase of Pluto atmospheric pressure between 1988 and 2002. Various occultations observed in 2006 and 2007 did not reveal any further increase in pressure. Also, a measure of Charon's radius was made using an occultation observed on 11 July 2005.
At the moment of writing this abstract, two Pluto occultations have been successfully observed, one on 22 June 2008 (with five positive detections from Australia) and one on 24 June 2008 (with one positive detection from CFHT/Mauna Kea, Hawaii). Furthermore, one positive observation of a Charon occultation has been achieved on 22 June 2008 from La Reunion Island. Data are still being analyzed, and three different results will be presented: (1) The evolution of Pluto's atmospheric pressure since 2002, (2) the evolution of Pluto's positional offset with respect to the DE413 barycentric ephemeris since 2005, showing in particular a linear trend and an offset in declination of more than +0.1 arcsec in 2008, and (3) a new, independent measure of the distance Pluto-Charon using the 22 June 2008 occultation, taking advantage that Pluto and Charon occulted the same target star. Note that since only one occultation chord is available for that event, it is not possible to update Charon's radius using this data.
Anderson Philip
Andrei Alexander H.
Assafin Marcelo
Batista Virginie
Behrend Raoul
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