Related papers: Occultation Searches for Kuiper Belt Objects

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…

We have performed a survey of the Kuiper belt covering ~ 1/3 a square degree of the sky using Suprime-cam on the Subaru telescope, to a limiting magnitude of m(R)~ 26.8 (50% threshold) and have found 36 new KBOs. We have confirmed that the…

The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…

We investigate what can be learned about a population of distant KBOs by studying the statistical properties of their light curves. Whereas others have successfully inferred the properties of individual, highly variable KBOs, we show that…

The population of the Kuiper Belt within 50 AU of the Sun has likely been severely depleted by gravitational perturbations from the giant planets, particularly Neptune. The density of Kuiper Belt objects is expected to be two orders of…

The Kuiper Belt (KB) region of the solar system, stretching from 30 to at least 50 AU, contains Pluto-Charon, some ~105 Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) larger than 100 km in diameter, and myriad smaller bodies produced by collisions among KBOs…

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…

We present the discovery of three new Scattered Kuiper Belt Objects (SKBOs) from a wide-field survey of the ecliptic. This continuing survey has to date covered 20.2 square degrees to a limiting red magnitude of 23.6. We combine the data…

Motivated by a desire to understand the size distributon of the Kuiper Belt, an observing program was conducted at the Mount Palomar 5-m telescope from 1994-1996. The observations consisted of follow-up observations of known objects (in…

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…

We describe analytical and numerical collisional evolution calculations for the size distribution of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt. For a wide range of bulk properties, initial masses, and orbital parameters, our results yield power-law…

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…

Almost all of the $>600$ known Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) have been discovered within 50 AU of the Sun. One possible explanation for the observed lack of KBOs beyond 50 AU is that the distant Kuiper belt is dynamically very cold, and thus…

All surveys include observational biases, which makes it impossible to directly compare properties of discovered trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) with dynamical models. However, by carefully keeping track of survey pointings on the sky,…

The observed size distribution of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs)--small icy and rocky solar system bodies orbiting beyond Neptune--is well described by a power law at large KBO sizes. However, recent work by Bernstein et al. (2003) indicates…

We conducted a two-night photometric survey of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) near opposition using the wide-field Hyper Suprime-Cam instrument on the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope. The survey covered about 90 deg^2 of sky, with each field…

We present the results of a pencil-beam survey of the Kuiper Belt using the Keck 10-m telescope. A single 0.01 square degree field is imaged 29 times for a total integration time of 4.8 hr. Combining exposures in software allows the…

This work investigates the use of stellar occultation measurements to enhance the orbit determination performance of the Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) mission, operating from a quasi-Halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point.…

Natural (such as lunar) occultations have long been used to study sources on small angular scales, while coronographs have been used to study high contrast sources. We propose launching the Big Occulting Steerable Satellite (BOSS), a large…

Euclid, which is primarily a dark-energy/cosmology mission, may have a microlensing component, consisting of perhaps four dedicated one-month campaigns aimed at the Galactic bulge. We show that such a program would yield excellent…