KUIPER BELT OBJECT OCCULTATIONS: EXPECTED RATES, FALSE POSITIVES, AND SURVEY DESIGN

A novel method of generating artificial scintillation noise is developed and used to evaluate occultation rates and false positive rates for surveys probing the Kuiper Belt with the method of serendipitous stellar occultations. A thorough examination of survey design shows that (1) diffraction-dominated occultations are critically (Nyquist) sampled at a rate of 2 Fsu−1, corresponding to 40 s−1 for objects at 40 AU, (2) occultation detection rates are maximized when targets are observed at solar opposition, (3) Main Belt asteroids will produce occultations light curves identical to those of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) if target stars are observed at solar elongations of: 116° ≲ ε ≲ 125°, or 131° ≲ ε ≲ 141°, and (4) genuine KBO occultations are likely to be so rare that a detection threshold of ≳7–8σ should be adopted to ensure that viable candidate events can be disentangled from false positives.