Related papers: Diagnosing Circumstellar Debris Disks
The first indication of the presence of a circumstellar debris disk is usually the detection of excess infrared emission from the population of small dust grains orbiting the star. This dust is short-lived, requiring continual…
The nearby main sequence star Beta Pictoris is surrounded by an edge-on disk of dust produced by the collisional erosion of larger planetesimals. Here we report the discovery of substructure within the northeast extension of the disk…
Debris disc analysis and modelling provide crucial information about the structure and the processes at play in extrasolar planetary systems. In binary systems, this issue is more complex because the disc should in addition respond to the…
We hypothesise that dust rings in protoplanetary discs formed by an embedded planet should have properties that reflect the planet's mass. We use 2D hydrodynamical simulations of planet-disc interactions to investigate this, focusing on…
Debris disks are thought to be sculptured by neighboring planets. The same is true for the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk, yet no direct observational evidence for signatures of giant planets in the Kuiper belt dust distribution has been…
We study the dynamical origin of the structures observed in the scattered-light images of the resolved debris disk around HD 141569A. We explore the roles of radiation pressure from the central star, gas drag from the gas disk, and the…
We apply our recently elaborated, powerful numerical approach to the high-resolution modeling of the structure and emission of circumstellar dust disks, incorporating all relevant physical processes. Specifically, we examine the resonant…
Observations of circumstellar disks provide a powerful tool for our understanding of planetary systems dynamics. Analogs to the Solar System asteroid belts, debris disks result from the collision of the remaining solid material of the…
(Abridged) The radii of debris disks and the sizes of their dust grains are tracers of the formation mechanisms and physical processes operating in these systems. We use a sample of 34 debris disks spatially resolved in various Herschel…
We consider constraints on the planetesimal population residing in the disks of AU Microscopii, Beta Pictoris and Fomalhaut taking into account their observed thicknesses and normal disk opacities. We estimate that bodies of radius 5, 180…
We present models for the formation of terrestrial planets, and the collisional evolution of debris disks, in planetary systems that contain multiple unstable gas giants. We previously showed that the dynamics of the giant planets…
Motivated by the reported dearth of debris discs around M stars, we use survival models to study the occurrence of planetesimal discs around them. These survival models describe a planetesimal disc with a small number of parameters,…
Planets can affect debris disk structure by creating gaps, sharp edges, warps, and other potentially observable signatures. However, there is currently no simple way for observers to deduce a disk-shepherding planet's properties from the…
The sticking of micron sized dust particles due to surface forces in circumstellar disks is the first stage in the production of asteroids and planets. The key ingredients that drive this process are the relative velocity between the dust…
A debris disk is a constituent of any planetary system surrounding a main sequence star. We study whether close stellar encounters can disrupt and strip a debris disk of its planetesimals in the expanding open cluster of its birth with a…
Detectable debris discs are thought to require dynamical excitation (`stirring'), so that planetesimal collisions release large quantities of dust. We investigate the effects of the secular perturbations of a planet, which may lie at a…
Beta Pictoris (Beta Pic)'s well-studied debris disk and two known giant planets, in combination with the stability of HST/STIS (and now also JWST), offers a unique opportunity to test planet-disk interaction models and to observe recent…
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…
We investigate whether varying the dust composition (described by the optical constants) can solve a persistent problem in debris disk modeling--the inability to fit the thermal emission without over-predicting the scattered light. We model…
Circumstellar debris disks are the extrasolar analogues of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. They consist of comets and leftover planetesimals that continuously collide and produce circumstellar dust that can be observed as infrared…