Related papers: Collisional Evolution of Irregular Satellite Swarm…
Irregular satellites are the minor bodies found orbiting all four Solar System giant planets, with large semi-major axes, eccentricities, and inclinations. Previous studies have determined that the Solar System's irregular satellites are…
We describe an extensive suite of numerical calculations for the collisional evolution of irregular satellite swarms around 1--300 M-earth planets orbiting at 120 AU in the Fomalhaut system. For 10--100 M-earth planets, swarms with initial…
The planet candidate Fomalhaut b is bright in optical light but undetected in longer wavelengths, requiring a large, reflective dust cloud. The most recent observations find an extremely eccentric orbit (e ~ 0.8), indicating that Fomalhaut…
Direct imaging surveys have found that long-period super-Jupiters are rare. By contrast, recent modeling of the widespread gaps in protoplanetary disks revealed by ALMA suggests an abundant population of smaller Neptune to Jupiter-mass…
Fomalhaut A is among the most well-studied nearby stars and has been discovered to possess a putative planetary object as well as a remarkable eccentric dust belt. This eccentric dust belt has often been interpreted as the dynamical…
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…
We describe a search for dust created in collisions between the Saturnian irregular satellites using archival \emph{Spitzer} MIPS observations. Although we detected a degree scale Saturn-centric excess that might be attributed to an…
Gas giant planets in the Solar system host large satellite systems with multiple regular and irregular moons. Regular moons revolve around their host planet in circular, low inclination short period orbits, and are thought to form in-situ…
The apparent detection of an exoplanet orbiting Fomalhaut was announced in 2008. However, subsequent observations of Fomalhaut b raised questions about its status: Unlike other exoplanets, it is bright in the optical and nondetected in the…
The diversity and quantity of moons in the Solar System suggest a manifold population of natural satellites exist around extrasolar planets. Of peculiar interest from an astrobiological perspective, the number of sizable moons in the…
It is believed that satellites of giant planets form in circumplanetary disks. Many of the previous contributions assumed that their formation process proceeds similarly to rocky planet formation, via accretion of the satellite seeds,…
Debris dust in the habitable zones of stars - otherwise known as exozodiacal dust - comes from extrasolar asteroids and comets and is thus an expected part of a planetary system. Background flux from the Solar System's zodiacal dust and the…
All four giant planets in the Solar system possess irregular satellites, characterized by large, highly eccentric and/or inclined orbits that are distinct from the nearly circular, uninclined orbits of the regular satellites. This…
Carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are significant contributors of carbonaceous dust to the galactic environment, however the mechanisms and conditions for formation and subsequent evolution of dust around these stars remain open questions.…
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…
The formation of planetesimals in the early Solar System is hardly understood, and in particular the growth of dust aggregates above millimeter sizes has recently turned out to be a difficult task in our understanding [Zsom et al. 2010,…
We consider the ability of three models - impacts, captures, and collisional cascades - to account for a bright cloud of dust in Fomalhaut b. Our analysis is based on a novel approach to the power-law size distribution of solid particles…
In this paper a simple analytical model for the steady-state evolution of debris disks due to collisions is confronted with Spitzer observations of main sequence A stars. All stars are assumed to have planetesimal belts with a distribution…
The abundance evolution of interstellar dust species originating from stellar sources and from condensation in molecular clouds in the local interstellar medium of the Milky Way is studied and the input of dust material to the Solar System…
This paper presents a model for the outcome of collisions between planetesimals in a debris disk and assesses the impact of collisional processes on the structure and size distribution of the disk. The model is presented by its application…