A Search for Kilometer-Size Kuiper Belt Objects with a 43-cm Telescope Using Stellar Occultations
Volume 52 number 2 (2024)
- Gary Vander Haagen
- Stonegate Observatory, 825 Stonegate Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48103; garyvh2@gmail.com
Abstract
An occultation search was conducted for Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) using a 43-cm corrected Dall-Kirkham telescope with a silicon-photomultiplier (SPM) detector operated at 50 samples/second. With total observing time of 363,301 seconds over an extended 26-month period, a single occultation of star HD139182 of 300 milliseconds’ duration was detected and the diffraction simulations matched as a 0.75-km radius KBO. The KBO surface density calculated from the data indicated an abundance of N(r > 750 m) = 9.7 × 104 deg^–2 over the ± 20-degree ecliptic latitude.