Upper Limits on the Number of Small Bodies in Sedna-Like Orbits by the Taos Project

Wang, J.-H.; Lehner, M. J.; Zhang, Z.-W.; Bianco, Federica; Alcock, Charles; Chen, W.-P.; Axelrod, T. S.; Byun, Yong Ik; Coehlo, N. K.; Cook, K. H.; Dave, R.; Pater, Imke de; Porrata, R.; Kim, Dae Won; King, S. K.; Lee, T.; Lin, H. C.; Lissauer, Jack J.; Marshall, Stuart; Protopapas, Pavlos; Rice, John A.; Schwamb, Megan E.; Wang, S.-Y.; Wen, C. Y.

doi:10.1088/0004-6256/138/6/1893

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…A single slope absolute magnitude distribution with slopes of 0.8 and 0.9 was used to determine the range of mass estimates. These slopes are consistent with the measurements of other TNO populations and the TAOS limit on the Sedna population (Wang et al 2009). An albedo of 16% and a density of 1 g cm…”

Section: Summary and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Consequences of a Distant Massive Planet on the Large Semimajor Axis Trans-Neptunian Objects

Shankman

Kavelaars

Lawler

et al. 2017

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We explore the distant giant planet hypothesis by integrating the large-semimajor-axis, large-pericenter transNeptunian objects (TNOs) in the presence of the giant planets and an external perturber whose orbit is consistent with the proposed distant, eccentric, and inclined giant planet, so-called planet 9. We find that TNOs with semimajor axes greater than 250 au experience some longitude of perihelion shepherding, but that a generic outcome of such evolutions is that the TNOs evolve to larger pericenter orbits and commonly get raised to retrograde inclinations. This pericenter and inclination evolution requires a massive disk of TNOs (tens of Å M ) in order to explain the detection of the known sample today. Some of the highly inclined orbits produced by the examined perturbers will be inside of the orbital parameter space probed by prior surveys, implying a missing signature of the ninth-planet scenario. The distant giant planet scenarios explored in this work do not reproduce the observed signal of simultaneous clustering in argument of pericenter, longitude of the ascending node, and longitude of perihelion in the region of the known TNOs.

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Section: Summary and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Consequences of a Distant Massive Planet on the Large Semimajor Axis Trans-Neptunian Objects

Shankman

Kavelaars

Lawler

et al. 2017

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“…The detection of such objects is difficult because they are extremely faint, with typical magnitudes ¢ > r 28, and are thus invisible to surveys using even the largest telescopes. However, a small TNO will induce a detectable drop in the measured brightness of a distant star when it passes across the line of sight (Bailey 1976;Roques et al 1987;Brown & Webster 1997;Roques & Moncuquet 2000;Cooray 2003;Cooray & Farmer 2003;Roques et al 2003Roques et al , 2006Chang et al 2006Chang et al , 2007Nihei et al 2007;Bickerton et al 2008Bickerton et al , 2009Liu et al 2008;Zhang et al 2008Zhang et al , 2013Bianco et al 2009;Schlichting et al 2009Schlichting et al , 2012Wang et al 2009Wang et al , 2010Bianco et al 2010;Arimatsu et al 2019aArimatsu et al , 2019b.The goal of the TAOS II project (Lehner et al 2014) is to detect such occultation events and measure the size distribution of TNOs with diameters 0.3 km < D < 30 km.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The TAOS II Survey: Real-time Detection and Characterization of Occultation Events

Huang

Lehner

Contreras

et al. 2021

PASP

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The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a blind occultation survey with the aim of measuring the size distribution of Trans-Neptunian Objects with diameters in the range of 0.3 ≲ D ≲ 30 km. TAOS II will observe as many as 10,000 stars at a cadence of 20 Hz with all three telescopes simultaneously. This will produce up to ∼20 billion photometric measurements per night, and as many as ∼6 trillion measurements per year, corresponding to over 70 million individual light curves. A very fast analysis pipeline for event detection and characterization is needed to handle this massive data set. The pipeline should be capable of real-time detection of events (within 24 hours of observations) for follow-up observations of any occultations by larger TNOs. In addition, the pipeline should be fast and scalable for large simulations where simulated events are added to the observed light curves to measure detection efficiency and biases in event characterization. Finally, the pipeline should provide estimates of the size of and distance to any occulting objects, including those with non-spherical shapes. This paper describes a new data analysis pipeline for the detection and characterization of occultation events.

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“…Such an approach, looking for serendipitous occultation events from a vast amount c 2016 RAS of data, has been being employed to study the size distribution of small Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) down to sub-kilometer size using optical data (Roques et al 2006;Bickerton, Kavelaars & Welch 2008;Schlichting et al 2012;Zhang et al 2013;Liu et al 2015) and even to decameter size using X-ray observations (Chang, Liu & Chen 2013). It has also been applied to estimating upper limits to the number of small objects at distances between 100 and 1000 AU with data accumulated by the TAOS project (Wang et al 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Upper limits to the number of Oort Cloud objects based on serendipitous occultation events search in X-rays

Chang

Liu

Shang

2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

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Using all the RXTE archival data of Sco X-1 and GX 5-1, which amount to about 1.6 mega seconds in total, we searched for possible occultation events caused by Oort Cloud Objects. The detection efficiency of our searching approach was studied with simulation. Our search is sensitive to object size of about 300 m in the inner Oort Cloud, taking 4000 AU as a representative distance, and of 900 m in the outer Oort Cloud, taking 36000 AU as the representative distance. No occultation events were found in the 1.6 Ms data. We derived upper limits to the number of Oort Cloud Objects, which are about three orders of magnitude higher than the highest theoretical estimates in the literature for the inner Oort Cloud, and about six orders higher for the outer Oort Cloud. Although these upper limits are not constraining enough, they are the first obtained observationally, without making any model assumptions about comet injection. They also provide guidance to such serendipitous occultation event search in the future.

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Upper Limits on the Number of Small Bodies in Sedna-Like Orbits by the Taos Project

Cited by 15 publications

References 28 publications

Consequences of a Distant Massive Planet on the Large Semimajor Axis Trans-Neptunian Objects

Consequences of a Distant Massive Planet on the Large Semimajor Axis Trans-Neptunian Objects

The TAOS II Survey: Real-time Detection and Characterization of Occultation Events

Upper limits to the number of Oort Cloud objects based on serendipitous occultation events search in X-rays

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