Large bodies in the Kuiper Belt

We present a survey for bright Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and Centaurs, conducted at the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) 0.9 m telescope with the KPNO 8K Mosaic CCD. The survey imaged 164 deg² near opposition to a limiting red magnitude of 21.1. Three bright KBOs and one Centaur were found, the brightest KBO having red magnitude 19.7, about 700 km in diameter, assuming a dark Centaur-like 4% albedo. We estimate the power-law differential size distribution of the classical KBOs to have index q = 4.2^+0.4_-0.3, with the total number of classical KBOs with diameters larger than 100 km equal to 4.7^+1.6_-1.0 × 10⁴. Additionally, we find that if there is a maximum object size in the Kuiper Belt, it must be larger than 1000 km in diameter. By extending our model to larger size bodies, we estimate that 30⁺¹⁶_-12 Charon-sized and 3.2^+2.8_-1.7 Pluto-sized classical KBOs remain undiscovered.