Observations of the distant Kuiper belt

This survey was designed to find the most distant members of the Kuiper Belt and beyond. We searched ~12000deg^2^ down to a mean limiting magnitude of 21.3 in R. A total number of 52 Kuiper Belt objects and Centaurs have been detected, 25 of which were discovered in this survey.

Except for the redetection of Sedna, no additional Sedna-like bodies with perihelia greater than 45AU were detected despite sensitivity out to distances of 1000AU. We discuss the implications for a distant Sedna-like population beyond the Kuiper Belt, focusing on the constraints we can place on the embedded stellar cluster environment the early Sun may be have been born in, where the location and distribution of Sedna-like orbits sculpted by multiple stellar encounters is indicative of the birth cluster size.