The TAOS Project: Statistical Analysis of Multi-Telescope Time Series Data

Creators: Lehner, M. J.; Coehlo, N. K.; Zhang, Z.-W.; Bianco, F. B.; Wang, J.-H.; Rice, J. A.; Protopapas, P.; Alcock, C.; Axelrod, T.; Byun, Y.-I.; Chen, W. P.; Cook, K. H.; de Pater, I.; Kim, D.-W.; King, S.-K.; Lee, T.; Marshall, S. L.; Schwamb, M. E.; Wang, S.-Y.; Wen, C.-Y.

Abstract

The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) monitors fields of up to ~1000 stars at 5 Hz simultaneously with four small telescopes to detect occultation events from small (~1 km) Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The survey presents a number of challenges, in particular the fact that the occultation events we are searching for are extremely rare and are typically manifested as slight flux drops for only one or two consecutive time series measurements. We have developed a statistical analysis technique to search the multi-telescope data set for simultaneous flux drops which provides a robust false-positive rejection and calculation of event significance. In this article, we describe in detail this statistical technique and its application to the TAOS data set.

Additional Information

© 2010 The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2010 February 18; accepted 2010 June 2; published 2010 June 30. This work was supported in part by the thematic research program AS-88-TP-A02 at Academia Sinica. N. K. C.'s work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant DMS-0636667.Work at the Harvard College Observatory was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant AST-0501681 and by NASA under grant NNG04G113G. The work at National Central University was supported by the grant NSC 96-2112-M-008-024-MY3. J. A. R.'s work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant AST-00507254. S. L. M.'s work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and by Stanford Linear Accelerator Center under Contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. Y. I. B. acknowledges the support of National Research Foundation of Korea through Grant 2009- 0075376. K. H. C.'s work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and in part under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

Attached Files

Published - Lehner2010p11107Publ_Astron_Soc_Pac.pdf

Files

Lehner2010p11107Publ_Astron_Soc_Pac.pdf

Files (1.2 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
Lehner2010p11107Publ_Astron_Soc_Pac.pdf md5:8ebea9de10c9b7f59f53b2ec7bffe451	1.2 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes