Related papers: Dynamics of Exozodiacal Clouds
In addition to planets and other small bodies, stellar systems will likely also host exozodiacal dust, or exozodi. This warm dust primarily resides in or near the habitable zone of a star, and scatters stellar light in visible to NIR…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
Exocomets are small bodies releasing gas and dust which orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first inferred from the detection of variable absorption features in stellar spectra in the late 1980s using spectroscopy. More…
The zodiacal light is a night-glow mostly visible along the plane of the ecliptic. It represents the background radiation associated with solar light scattered by the tenuous flattened interplanetary cloud of dust particles surrounding the…
(abridged) This review is based on an extensive work done in collaboration with N. Gorkavyi, J. Mather, and T. Taidakova, which aimed at the physical modelling of the interplanetary dust (IPD) cloud in the Solar system, i.e., establishing a…
The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) spacecraft has transited the inner-most regions of the zodiacal cloud and detects impacts to the spacecraft body via its electric field instrument. Multiple dust populations have been proposed to explain the PSP…
"Debris disks" around young stars (analogues of the Kuiper Belt in our Solar System) show a variety of non-trivial structures attributed to planetary perturbations and used to constrain the properties of the planets. However, these analyses…
The eccentric orbits of the known extrasolar giant planets provide evidence that most planet-forming environments undergo violent dynamical instabilities. Here, we numerically simulate the impact of giant planet instabilities on planetary…
The zodiacal cloud is one of the largest structures in the solar system and strongly governed by meteoroid collisions near the Sun. Collisional erosion occurs throughout the zodiacal cloud, yet it is historically difficult to directly…
Models of the zodiacal cloud's thermal emission and sporadic meteoroids suggest Jupiter-family comets (JFCs) as the dominant source of interplanetary dust. However, comet sublimation is insufficient to sustain the quantity of dust presently…
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
We discuss the current knowledge of the Solar system, focusing on bodies in the outer regions, on the information they provide concerning Solar system formation, and on the possible relationships that may exist between our system and the…
Recent advances in astronomical instrumentation mean that we are now able to image the thermal emission from the disks of dust around main sequence stars that may be the fossil remnants of planetary formation. These observations imply that…
The solar system's Zodiacal Cloud is visible to the unaided eye, yet the origin of its constituent dust particles is not well understood, with a wide range of proposed divisions between sources in the asteroid belt and Jupiter Family…
Main sequence stars, like the Sun, are often found to be orbited by circumstellar material that can be categorized into two groups, planets and debris. The latter is made up of asteroids and comets, as well as the dust and gas derived from…
Measurements by dust detectors on interplanetary spacecraft appear to indicate a substantial flux of interstellar particles with masses exceeding 10^{-12}gram. The reported abundance of these massive grains cannot be typical of interstellar…
Circumstantial evidence suggests that most known extra-solar planetary systems are survivors of violent dynamical instabilities. Here we explore how giant planet instabilities affect the formation and survival of terrestrial planets. We…
We have begun an observational program to search nearby stars for dust disks that are analogous to the disk of zodiacal dust that fills the interior of our solar system. We imaged six nearby main-sequence stars with the Keck telescope at…
The solar system is dusty, and would become dustier over time as asteroids collide and comets disintegrate, except that small debris particles in interplanetary space do not last long. They can be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter,…
Planets embedded within dust disks may drive the formation of large scale clumpy dust structures by trapping dust into resonant orbits. Detection and subsequent modeling of the dust structures would help constrain the mass and orbit of the…