• DOI:10.1023/B:MOON.0000031929.19729.A1
• Corpus ID: 189905639

The Caltech Wide Area Sky Survey

@article{Trujillo2003TheCW,
  title={The Caltech Wide Area Sky Survey},
  author={Chadwick A. Trujillo and M. E. Brown},
  journal={Earth, Moon, and Planets},
  year={2003},
  volume={92},
  pages={99-112}
}

• C. Trujillo, M. Brown
• Published 1 June 2003
• Physics, Geology
• Earth, Moon, and Planets

The first phase of the Caltech Wide Area Sky Survey occurred from lateNovember 2001 through mid-April 2003. We present preliminary resultsfrom this survey which has detected 28 bright Kuiper Belt Objects(KBOs) and 4 Centaurs, 19 of which were discovered in our surveyincluding Quaoar, the largest KBO, as well as 6 of the 10intrinsically brightest KBOs. We have surveyed 5108 square degrees ofthe sky nearest the invariable plane to a limiting red magnitude of20.7. Correcting for the overabundance of objects near the invariableplane, this represents 27% completeness in terms of KBO numbers.Thus, approximately 100 KBOs and Centaurs brighter than mR = 20.7exist, about 3/4 of which remain undiscovered. The bright KBOs areconsistent with the canonical q=4 size distribution, suggesting thatabout ten 1000 km diameter KBOs and about one 2000 km diameter KBOexist. Additionally, we observe only 3 KBOs with low inclination(i < 7 degrees) with 67% of the sky available to these objectssurveyed. This is in sharp contrast with the known KBOs, of whichabout 60% of the ∼ 800 observed objects (as of May 2003) have i< 7 degrees. Although we observe at systematically higher invariableplane latitudes than many deeper KBO surveys, such systematic biasescannot fully explain the lack of low inclination objects, ameasurement which is significant at the > 3 σ level. Thissuggests that the bright KBOs have a fundamentally different maximumsize than the fainter KBOs. A better characterization of the surveylimiting magnitude and a more thorough modeling of observational biaseffects of different classes of KBOs will be made in a future work.