Pencil-beam surveys for trans-neptunian objects: Limits on distant populations

Two populations of minor bodies in the outer Solar System remain particularly elusive: Scattered Disk Objects and Sedna-like objects. These populations are important dynamical tracers, and understanding the details of their spatial- and size-distributions will enhance our understanding of the formation and on-going evolution of the Solar System. By using newly-derived limits on the maximum heliocentric distances that recent pencil-beam surveys for trans-neptunian objects were sensitive to, we determine new upper limits on the total numbers of distant SDOs and Sedna-like objects. While generally consistent with populations estimated from wide-area surveys, we show that for magnitude-distribution slopes of α ≳ 0.7-1.0, these pencil-beam surveys provide stronger upper limits than current estimates in literature.