Related papers: Kuiper Belt Object Occultations: Expected Rates, F…
Occultations, the covering up of one celestial body by another celestial body, have been used in astronomy for millennia to learn about the sun and moon. Since 2018, VERITAS has implemented a program to detect predicted asteroid…
Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…
Existing and planned optical telescopes and surveys can detect artificially-illuminated objects comparable in total brightness to a major terrestrial city out to the outskirts of the Solar System. Orbital parameters of Kuiper belt objects…
The limiting magnitude of the HST data set used by Cochran et al. (1995) to detect small objects in the Kuiper belt is reevaluated, and the methods used are described in detail. It is shown, by implanting artificial objects in the original…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to detect serendipitous occultations of stars by small (about 1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (<0.001 events per star per year) and short…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) monitors fields of up to ~1000 stars at 5 Hz simultaneously with four small telescopes to detect occultation events from small (~1 km) Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The survey presents a number…
We measured the mean plane of the Kuiper belt as a function of semi-major axis. For the classical Kuiper belt as a whole (the non-resonant objects in the semi-major axis range 42--48~au), we find a mean plane of inclination…
The Oort cloud is presumably a pristine relic of the Solar System formation. Detection of the Oort cloud may provide information regarding the stellar environment in which the Sun was born and on the planetesimal population during the outer…
We preliminarily investigate the impact of the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and of the asteroid ring on some proposed high-precision tests of Newtonian and post-Newtonian gravity to be performed in the Solar System by means of spacecraft in…
I show that the WFIRST microlensing survey will enable detection and precision orbit determination of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) down to H_=28.2 over an effective area of about 17 sq.deg. Typical fractional period errors will be about 1.5%…
We propose that extrasolar asteroid belts can be detected through their gravitational microlensing signatures. Asteroid belt + star lens systems create so-called "pseudo-caustics", regions in the source plane where the magnification…
Asteroid sizes can be directly measured by observing occultations of stars by asteroids. When there are enough observations across the path of the shadow, the asteroid's projected silhouette can be reconstructed. Asteroid shape models…
We observed the July 17, 2017 stellar occultation of HD 168233 by the Kuiper Belt Object (486958) 2014 MU$_{69}$, the close flyby target of the extended New Horizons mission. Rather than capture a solid body occultation by the KBO itself,…
Mean plane measurements of the Kuiper Belt from observational data are of interest for their potential to test dynamical models of the solar system. Recent measurements have yielded inconsistent results. Here we report a measurement of the…
We propose to design and build an algorithm that will use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and observations from the Unistellar network to reliably detect asteroid occultations. The Unistellar Network, made of more than 10,000 digital…
The hypothesis that a massive Planet Nine exists in the outer solar system on a distant eccentric orbit was inspired by observations showing that the objects with the most distant eccentric orbits in the Kuiper belt have orbits which are…
Results from the first two years of data from the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) are presented. Stars have been monitored photometrically at 4 Hz or 5 Hz to search for occultations by small (~3 km) Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs).…
Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…
(Abridged) Lunar occultations (LO) are a very efficient and powerful technique, that achieves the best combination of high angular resolution and sensitivity possible today at near-infrared wavelengths. Given that the events are fixed in…
We describe digital tracking, a method for asteroid searches that greatly increases the sensitivity of a telescope to faint unknown asteroids. It has been previously used to detect faint Kuiper Belt objects using the Hubble Space Telescope…