IAU Colloquium 168
Cometary Nuclei in Space and Time

Nanjing, China
May 18-22, 1998

Electronically-submitted Abstracts of Participants


ISO Observations of Thermal Emission from Kuiper Belt Objects
N.Thomas, S.Eggers, G.Lichtenberg, W.H.Ip, A.Fitzsimmons, G.Hahn, H.U.Keller, H.Rauer, I.P.Williams; Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie

It is usually assumed that objects in the Kuiper-Edgeworth belt (KBOs) are dark with albedoes similar to those of comet Halley (geometric albedo = 0.04). This assumption allows one to compute radii for the objects from the visible magnitudes determined from ground-based observation yielding radii of around 150 km for the brightest objects. This is, nevertheless, an assumption based on rather tenuous hypotheses. In order to separate the radius from the albedo it is necessary to measure the thermal emission from these objects which peaks in the 50 - 100 micron region of the spectrum. Detailed signal to noise calculations prior to launch suggested that these objects should be detectable with the instrument complement on the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). The ISOPHOT experiment on ISO was used in an attempt to detect thermal emission from several of the brightest Kuiper Belt Objects. However, the reduction has revealed that the identification of the objects is not straightforward despite the significant amount of time given to the project (principally because of poorer than expected in-flight performance of ISOPHOT). We report on the latest analysis of the data and attempt to reach conclusions on the albedo and diameters of KBOs.



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Created 28 Apr 1998. yfp.