Recovery Bias in the Kuiper Belt

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Are there observational biases in favor of recovering Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in particular types of orbits? Depending on the quality, circumstances, and frequency of the discovery epoch astrometric measurements, an ephemeris used for a recovery observation may be highly uncertain, and based on an educated guess for an orbit (which in turn is based on the current understanding of Kuiper belt orbits). If enough time has passed since the previous measurements, only those objects for which the assumed orbits were nearly correct will be reliably recovered. The result of such a bias is that the KBOs that are preferentially lost are the very ones that are most interesting because they are not in ``typical'' assumed orbits. These biases are particularly sensitive to the measurements made within the first year of discovery. We use the objects from the well-characterized Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS) as the basis for our analysis of possible recovery biases, and compare results from different commonly-use methods of orbital fitting and ephemeris predictions.
This work partially supported by grant NNG04GI29G through the NASA Planetary Astronomy Program.

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