Related papers: The Kuiper Belt and Other Debris Disks

Debris disks are exoplanetary systems containing planets, minor bodies (such as asteroids and comets) and debris dust. Unseen planets are presumed to perturb the minor bodies into crossing orbits, generating small dust grains that are…

Most stars form in dense stellar environments, where frequent close encounters can strongly perturb and reshape the early architecture of planetary systems. The solar system, with its rich population of distant comets, provides a natural…

The number of stars that are known to have debris disks is greater than that of stars known to harbour planets. These disks are detected because dust is created in the destruction of planetesimals in the disks much in the same way that dust…

Debris disks are evidence that stars harbor reservoirs of dust-producing plantesimals on spatial scales similar the solar system. Debris disks present a wide range of sizes and structural features and there is growing evidence that, in some…

Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…

The population of the Kuiper Belt within 50 AU of the Sun has likely been severely depleted by gravitational perturbations from the giant planets, particularly Neptune. The density of Kuiper Belt objects is expected to be two orders of…

Debris disks or exo-Kuiper belts, detected through their thermal or scattered emission from their dusty components, are ubiquitous around main-sequence stars. Since dust grains are short-lived, their sustained presence is thought to require…

Our current knowledge of the dynamical structure of the Kuiper Belt is reviewed here. Numerical results on long term orbital evolution and dynamical mechanisms underlying the transport of objects out of the Kuiper Belt are discussed.…

Circumstellar disks have long been regarded as windows into planetary systems. The advent of high sensitivity, high resolution imaging in the submillimetre where both the solid and gas components of disks can be detected opens up new…

Earth occasionally crosses the debris streams produced by comets and other active bodies in our solar system. These manifest meteor showers that provide an opportunity to explore these bodies without a need to visit them in-situ.…

Our understanding of the history of the solar system has undergone a revolution in recent years, owing to new theoretical insights into the origin of Pluto and the discovery of the Kuiper belt and its rich dynamical structure. The emerging…

Planetary debris disks around other stars are analogous to the Asteroid and Kuiper belts in the Solar System. Their structure reveals the configuration of small bodies and provides hints for the presence of planets. The nearby star…

Optically thin dusty disks around Main Sequence stars consist of debris from catastrophic collisions or from low erosion of long-lived planetesimals. Resolved observations of dusty disks have systematically evidenced asymmetries and annular…

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 report several results related to the dynamical evolution of dust produced in the Kuiper Belt (KB). We show that its particle size frequency distribution in space is greatly changed from the distribution at production, as a results of…

Debris belts on the periphery of planetary systems, encompassing the region occupied by planetary orbits, are massive analogues of the Solar system's Kuiper belt. They are detected by thermal emission of dust released in collisions amongst…

Objects in the Kuiper belt are small and far away thus difficult to study in detail even with the best telescopes available at earth. For much of the early history of the Kuiper belt, studies of the compositions of these objects were…

The serendipitous detection of stellar occultations by Outer Solar System objects is a powerful method for ascertaining the small end ($r \lesssim 15$ km) of the size distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects and may potentially allow the…

(Abridged) Using an efficient computational approach, we have reconstructed the structure of the dust cloud in the Solar system between 0.5 and 100 AU produced by the Kuiper belt objects. Our simulations offer a 3-D physical model of the…

Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…