So choose a patch of sky, maybe 1 degree on a side and sweep it with a radar beam to see what’s out there. That might give you a pretty good census of how many objects exist out there per unit area of sky.

“What they found is rather surprising: after 200 hours of observing, they didn’t see a single event! Not one star appears to have been occulted (blocked) by a KBO. This means there are much fewer of them out there in that size range than previously thought.

“Why? It’s too early to say. Maybe the small ones at that distance have all stuck together to form bigger objects. Maybe the small ones are sensitive to some force or event than bigger ones, making them preferentially go away (dropped into the inner solar system, or flung farther out than the survey can find them). Right now, all we know is that our back yard isn’t as crowded as we first thought.”

WHAT is “rather surprising”? I’m never sure exactly what that “what we previously thought” stuff is. Everybody in pop-science reporting invokes it, as if there must always be a pre-established solid consensus on matters nobody really knows about from any observational or experimental data. Whatever we supposedly “previously thought” comes about from theoretical suggestions. Yet it becomes “what we previously thought” every time somebody writes about it (invariably for the FIRST time in pop science articles) in light of new OBSERVATIONAL or EXPERIMENTAL info that becomes available which doesn’t resonate with the theoretical ‘consensus’ allegedly already in place.

How “crowded” can we expect it to be out in the “Kuiper belt”? Certainly, it is obvious there’s LOTS of room out there. And theoretical studies have long since already suggested that the belt-like distribution of objects in the so-called “Kuiper BELT” would be significantly more diffused out of the ecliptic than objects that are distributed even in the asteroid belt, which aren’t distributed in a crisply narrow range of inclinations either. Those and similar theoretical studies that stretch back all the way to Jan Oort’s own studies and earlier suggest that the departures of inclinations from the ecliptic increase with distance, so that the Kuiper “belt” insensibly becomes a “cloud” farther out with relatively little “memory” of their ecliptic heritage. It’s relatively simple to show that chaotic gravitational stirring will do that.

If that’s all more or less correct, the population density of objects that must be distributed into a more diffuse configuration that departs from the ecliptic can easily account for the apparent “expected lack” of occultations by smaller objects when staring at a particular x-ray source (of course, along the ecliptic, which is an entirely suitable target, since one would still expect some residual concentration along it). Mind you, the SAME NUMBER of objects CAN be out there, except they aren’t as concentrated along the ecliptic plane as “previously thought”.

Doesn’t that make at least as much sense as concluding that those smaller objects (by the zillions) are NOT there just because we haven’t detected any occultations of smallish objects over a POINT SOURCE after a mere 200 hours? After staring at a point source for only a little over 8 days (not to mention the sporadic quality of the data)? Is the latter conclusion really more justified than the possibility that we have chosen to accentuate the research against a spurious notion of a distribution confined to a more crisply-defined “belt”? With no mention of OTHER theoretical considerations that have demonstrated how lower mass objects tend to be more dynamically scattered than more massive objects within the same regime?

This sort of thing is rampant in science reporting, especially in astronomical reporting, and it’s been getting rapidly worse over the last decade or so. Almost every article that utilizes the “what we previously thought” gag contributes to the public’s misconception of science, as a vessel of knowledge that already has a fixed picture of the way things are. No mention is ever made that scientists view ALL conclusions as provisional, and ALWAYS subject to ammendment, confirmation or refutation by new information that might come along.

This horrible “journalistic habit” is tantamount to fixing within the public a mindset of certainty that only a religion could love.

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0805.1579

The initial interpretation of the observations was in line with the old estimates of the number of smallish KBOs, so the new interpretaion is in line with both the TAOS results and Hubble results cited by Kullat Nunu.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/nature04941.html