solar system formation

The TAOS Project: Upper Bounds on the Population of Small Kuiper Belt Objects and Tests of Models of Formation and Evolution ...

We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey (TAOS). TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). This data set comprises 5 × 105 star hours of multi-telescope photometric data taken at 4 or 5 Hz. No events consistent with KBO occultations were found in this data set. We compute the number of events expected for the Kuiper Belt formation and evolution models of Pan & Sari, Kenyon & Bromley, Benavidez & Campo Bagatin, and Fraser.
The Astronomical Journal, Volume 139, Issue 4, pp. 1499-1514 (2010).