Principal Investigator Hilke Schlichting
The Kuiper Belt is located at the outskirts of our planetary system just beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is believed to be the source region of the short period comets. However cometary sized bodies are typically too small to be detected in reflected light when still residing in the Kuiper Belt. Such objects can however be detected indirectly by stellar occultations. As a small object crosses the line of sight to a background star it will partially obscure the stellar light, which can be detected in the star's light curve. In 2009 we analyzed 30,000 star hours of data obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope and reported the first occultation of a background star by a km-sized Kuiper Belt object (Schlichting et al. 2009, Nature). My group is working on the analysis of the remaining HST data hoping to find additional occultation events (Schlichting et al. 2012). We are also collaborating with Gregg Hallinan’s group at Caltech, which built a dedicated instrument called CHIMERA for the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar, to carry out an occultation survey from the ground, that is 10-100 times more powerful than our current HST survey.