Related papers: Nulling interferometry: performance comparison bet…

[Abridged] Debris disks are extrasolar analogs to the solar system planetesimal belts. The star Fomalhaut harbors a cold debris belt at 140 AU as well as evidence of a warm dust component, which is suspected of being a bright analog to the…

Protoplanetary discs, when externally irradiated by Far Ultraviolet (FUV) photons from OBA-type stars, lose material through photoevaporative winds, reducing the amount of material available to form planets. Understanding the link between…

The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) enables nulling interferometric observations across the N band (8 to 13 um) to suppress a star's bright light and probe for faint circumstellar emission. We present and statistically…

Precise near-infrared radial velocimetry enables efficient detection and transit verification of low-mass extrasolar planets orbiting M dwarf hosts, which are faint for visible-wavelength radial velocity surveys. The TripleSpec Exoplanet…

We provide simple polynomial fits to the X-ray photoelectric cross-sections (0.03 < E < 10keV) for mixtures of gas and dust found in protoplanetary disks. Using the solar elemental abundances of Asplund et al. (2009) we treat the gas and…

CONTEXT: Simple geometrical ring models account well for near-infrared interferometric observations of dusty disks surrounding pre-main sequence stars of intermediate mass. Such models demonstrate that the dust distribution in these disks…

Unveiling the physical structure of protoplanetary disk is crucial for interpreting the diversity of the exoplanet population. Until recently, the census of the physical properties of protoplanetary disks probed by mid-infrared observations…

Debris discs are a consequence of the planet formation process and constitute the fingerprints of planetesimal systems. Their solar system's counterparts are the asteroid and Edgeworth-Kuiper belts. The DUNES survey aims at detecting…

The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) is a future world facility that will image the process of planetary formation. It will have an angular resolution and sensitivity sufficient to resolve sub-Hill sphere structures around newly formed giant…

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…

Cool debris discs are a relic of the planetesimal formation process around their host star, analogous to the solar system's Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. As such, they can be used as a proxy to probe the origin and formation of planetary systems…

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…

The Kepler Mission recently identified 997 systems hosting candidate extrasolar planets, many of which are super-Earths. Realizing these planetary systems are candidates to host extrasolar asteroid belts, we use mid-infrared data from the…

(Abridged) A numerical model of a circumstellar debris disk is developed and applied to observations of the circumstellar dust orbiting beta Pictoris. The model accounts for the rates at which dust is produced by collisions among unseen…

A significant population of nearby stars have strong far-infrared excesses, now known to be due to circumstellar dust in regions analogous to the Kuiper Belt of our solar system, though orders of magnitude more dense. Recent sub-mm and mm…

Warm debris disks around main-sequence stars trace late-stage terrestrial planet formation. Motivated by the need for systematic searches of such systems, we identify debris disk candidates around FGK stars within 150 pc by combining a…

The Beta Pictoris Moving Group is a nearby stellar association of young (12Myr) co-moving stars including the classical debris disk star beta Pictoris. Due to their proximity and youth they are excellent targets when searching for…

Context. Spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres at high resolving powers is rapidly gaining popularity to measure the presence of atomic and molecular species. While this technique is robust against contaminant absorption in the Earth's…

Galactic interstellar dust (ISD) is the major ingredient in planetary formation. However, information on this important material has been extremely limited. Recently the Ulysses dust detector has identified and measured interstellar dust…

We present near and mid-infrared interferometric observations made with the Keck Interferometer Nuller and near-contemporaneous spectro-photometry from the IRTF of 11 well known young stellar objects, several observed for the first time in…