Results from the first 2 years of data from the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) are presented. Stars have been monitored photometrically at 4 or 5 Hz to search for occultations by small (∼3 km) Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). No statistically significant events were found, allowing us to present an upper bound to the size distribution of KBOs with diameters 0.5 km ! D ! 28 km.
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) project has collected more than a billion photometric measurements since 2005 January. These sky survey datacovering timescales from a fraction of a second to a few hundred days-are a useful source to study stellar variability. A total of 167 star fields, mostly along the ecliptic plane, have been selected for photometric monitoring with the TAOS telescopes. This paper presents our initial analysis of a search for periodic variable stars from the timeseries TAOS data on one particular TAOS field, No. 151 (RA = 17 h 30 m 6. s 67, Dec = 27 • 17 ′ 30 ′′ , J2000), which had been observed over 47 epochs in 2005. A total of 81 candidate variables are identified in the 3 square degree field, with magnitudes in the range 8 < R < 16. On the basis of the periodicity and shape of the lightcurves, 29 variables, 15 of which were previously unknown, are classified as RR Lyrae, Cepheid, δ Scuti, SX Phonencis, semi-regular and eclipsing binaries.
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