Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.4011g&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #40.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1001
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
1
Scientific paper
Starting March 2003, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope began a large-scale, fully-characterized, ecliptic plane survey for Kuiper Belt Objects. The discovery phase ended July 2005 having searched and characterized 320 square degrees. The critical long-term follow-up campaign, aimed at determining the orbits of almost all the detected objects, ran until 2009. Our dedicated effort resulted in 85% of our sample being tracked over 3 or more oppositions, yielding 169 objects for which all discovery, follow-up circumstances, and biases are known and can be accurately modeled.
We find that the so-called 'main' classical belt shows a complex dynamical structure even in the limited region of 40-47 AU. At least three sub-components are required to model the population, not just a 'hot' and 'cold' component separated by an inclination cut. We retain a 'hot' component (which we are able to extend throughout the Kuiper Belt, out to at least 70 AU), but find that the lower-inclination population cannot be represented by a single simple structure in a/e space. We separate it into a 'stirred' component which extends from 42.5 to 44.4 AU, and a very confined 'kernel' component, which may be a dynamical family.
Our model reproduces the orbital-element and magnitude distributions of the Kuiper Belt. At 95% confidence level the 'cold' inclination sub-populations (stirred plus kernel) have a steeper size distribution in the H=7-8 range than the hot component. We also find that the inner and outer classical belts lack a cold component (raising intriguing cosmogonic questions), the resonances are well populated and have very hot inclination distributions (except those for which erosion might explain an absence of low-i TNOs), and the leading/trailing asymmetry for the transneptunian 2:1 resonance is not supported by CFEPS.
CFEPS Team
Gladman Brett
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