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Scientists see fewer rocks than expected in solar belt

“We were able to observe the outer Solar System ... These objects were very small, only larger than an ordinary track field.”

— Chen Wen-ping, NCU professor of astrology

Two years of collaboration between researchers from Taiwan, the US and South Korea recently found that the outer Solar System might not be as crowded as astronomers thought.

The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) — a cooperation project between Academia Sinica’s Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, National Central University’s (NCU) Institute of Astronomy and Yonsei University in South Korea — observed orbiting objects in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune, since 2005, NCU said in a press release yesterday.

The research targeted objects — mostly chunks of rocks or ice — between 3km and 28km in diameter by recording the luminosity of stars as the objects passed and occluded them, NCU said.

The method made TAOS the only research team in the world that could probe these objects, as they were too small to be seen directly through a telescope, the school said.

“We were able to observe the outer Solar System ... These objects were very small, only larger than an ordinary track field,” NCU professor of astrology Chen Wen-ping (陳文屏) said.

Analysis of some 7 billion bits of data collected by the project over the past two years showed that no occultation was recorded, NCU said.

NCU vice chancellor Ip Wing-huen (葉永烜), a noted astronomer in Taiwan, said the research team estimated there were between 10 times to 100 times less orbiting objects in the Kuiper Belt than astronomers had previously estimated.

The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last Wednesday.
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