Large bodies in the Kuiper Belt

We present a survey for bright Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and Centaurs, con ducted at the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) 0.9 m telescope with th e KPNO 8K Mosaic CCD. The survey imaged 164 deg(2) near opposition to a lim iting 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, assu ming a dark Centaur-like 4% albedo. We estimate the power-law differential size distribution of the classical KBOs to have index q = 4.2(-0.3)(+0.4), with the total number of classical KBOs with diameters larger than 100 km e qual to 4.7(-1.0)(+1.6) x 10(4). Additionally, we find that if there is a m aximum object size in the Kuiper Belt, it must be larger than 1000 km in di ameter. By extending our model to larger size bodies, we estimate that 30(- 12)(+16) Charon-sized and 3.2(-1.7)(+2.8) Pluto-sized classical KBOs remain undiscovered.