Документ взят из кэша поисковой машины. Адрес оригинального документа : http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~micheleb/images/TNO2010_abstract_MTB.pdf Дата изменения: Thu Dec 2 08:47:33 2010 Дата индексирования: Tue Oct 2 06:05:37 2012 Кодировка: Поисковые слова: asteroid

A search for large bright southern TNOs in the Siding Spring Survey dataset
Michele T. Bannister Brian P. Schmidt
mso, anu


Michael E. Brown
Caltech

Mt Stromlo Observatory, the Australian National University

Rob McNaught
Siding Spring Observatory, anu

Gordon Garrad
sso, anu

Stephen Larson
University of Arizona

Edward Beshore
ua

The trans-Neptunian ob jects (TNOs) have b een extensively surveyed in the Northern Hemisphere sky, with the detection of four dwarf planets and several other large ob jects. However, only minimal surveying has yet b een made of the Southern Hemisphere: none of the few detections made by Moody (2003) have subsequently b een successfully re-observed for recovery and determination of their orbits, and they are considered lost. As most known large TNOs have substantial orbital inclinations of tens of degrees, a survey of the entire southern sky, far from the ecliptic, is at a p ossible advantage for detecting new large bright TNOs. These factors make the characterization of the bright Southern Hemisphere TNO p opulation a high priority. We present our analysis of 9,500 square degrees of sky south of the ecliptic that have more than thirty nights of observation over five years, with an approximate limiting flux of m(clear ) 19.5. This is the largest spatial coverage of any southern TNO survey. The dense temp oral coverage of this dataset will give detected ob jects orbits with extremely small errors, so initial dynamical characterisations will b e p ossible without lengthy followup observation. We have implemented a TNO-finding pip eline to process the more than 500,000 images of the Siding Spring Survey. This ongoing survey for near-Earth asteroids has b een op erating at the 0.5 m Uppsala telescop e at Siding Spring Observatory since 2004, with a cadence of 3-5 images on each 4 square degree field over 45 minutes. This kind of analysis of an extended-length dataset, observed in a cadence quite different from a normal TNO survey, has not previously b een tried for TNO detection. We will discuss our pip eline and the results of our analysis.



Contact: michele@mso.anu.edu.au