Are there more big Kuiper Belt Object like Quaoar that we haven seen?
It is very likely that there are more big Kuiper Belt Objects like Quaoar. We looked at only 5% of the entire sky before finding Quaoar. So there could be 20 Quaoars out there and we wouldn’t have seen them yet. It is also likely that a few Plutos are out there waiting to be discovered. We have so far looked mostly in the plane of the solar system, where objects are most likely to be. It’s likely that our discovery rates will go down as we get further and further from the solar system plane (the ecliptic) but we still expect to find maybe 10 more objects, given current models of the Kuiper Belt thickness.
