Detecting Interstellar Objects Through Stellar Occultations
Amir Siraj, Abraham Loeb
(Submitted on 8 Jan 2020)
Stellar occultations have been used to search for Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud objects. We propose a search for interstellar objects based on the characteristic durations (∼0.1s) of their stellar occultation signals and high inclination relative to the ecliptic plane. An all-sky monitoring program of ∼2×107 stars with an R-band magnitude of 14 using 1-m telescopes with 0.1s cadences, is predicted to discover ≳5 interstellar objects per year.
Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; submitted to ApJL
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2001.02681 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2001.02681v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Amir Siraj
[v1] Wed, 8 Jan 2020 19:00:01 UTC (108 KB)
