Where have all the little Plutos gone?

Ambitious project to track down small, icy bodies has gone cold An ambitious project to track down small, icy bodies circling in the far reaches of the solar system has gone cold. Apparently, Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) between two and 17 miles in diameter don't exist. That's the conclusion researchers made after spending two years watching for tiny flickers of light as small KBOs eclipsed background stars, a technique scientists thought would reveal objects too tiny to be spotted directly. But the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey, called TAOS, didn't see any flickers. Scientists accumulated more than 200 hours of data using three telescopes in Taiwan that studied light from between 200 and 2,000 stars simultaneously. Scientists suspect the dearth of small objects may be because bodies of that size have already clumped... [read full story]