Related papers: Do we Need to Solve the Exozodi Question? If Yes, …
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…
For exoplanet direct detection mission concepts such as Terrestrial Planet Finder or Exoplanet Probe, light from the exozodiacal dust tends to obscure any exoplanets present in the image. Data analysis methods to identify point sources…
Future direct observations of extrasolar Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone could be hampered by a worrisome source of noise, starlight-reflecting exozodiacal dust. Mid-infrared surveys are currently underway to constrain the amount…
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…
Exo-zodiacal dust, exozodi for short, is warm (~300K) or hot (up to ~2000K) dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems around main sequence stars. In analogy to our own zodiacal dust, it may be located in or near the habitable…
Exozodiacal dust disks (exozodis) are populations of warm (~300K) or hot (~1000K) dust, located in or interior to a star's habitable zone, detected around ~25% of main-sequence stars as excess emission over the stellar photosphere at mid-…
The inner Solar System contains a cloud of small (1-100 micron) dust grains created when small bodies-asteroids, comets, and Kuiper belt objects-collide and outgas. This dust cloud, the zodiacal cloud probably has extrasolar analogs,…
Detecting Earth-like exoplanets in direct images of nearby Sun-like systems brings a unique set of challenges that must be addressed in the early phases of designing a space-based direct imaging mission. In particular, these systems may…
Exozodiacal dust is warm or hot dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems orbiting main sequence stars, in or around their habitable zones. The dust can be the most luminous component of extrasolar planetary systems, but…
A warm/hot dust component (at temperature $>$ 300K) has been detected around $\sim$ 20% of stars. This component is called "exozodiacal dust" as it presents similarities with the zodiacal dust detected in our Solar System, even though its…
Observing Earth-like exoplanets orbiting within the habitable zone of Sun-like stars and studying their atmospheres in reflected starlight requires contrasts of $\sim1\mathrm{e}{-10}$ in the visible. At such high contrast, starlight…
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…
Excess near-infrared emission is detected around one fifth of main-sequence stars, but its nature is a mystery. These excesses are interpreted as thermal emission from populations of small, hot dust very close to their stars (`hot…
High levels of exozodiacal dust are observed around a growing number of main sequence stars. The origin of such dust is not clear, given that it has a short lifetime against both collisions and radiative forces. Even a collisional cascade…
With the number of confirmed rocky exoplanets increasing steadily, their characterisation and the search for exoplanetary biospheres is becoming an increasingly urgent issue in astrobiology. We aim to investigate the possibility of…
We present a way of searching for non-transiting exoplanets with dusty tails. In the transiting case, the extinction by dust during the transit removes more light from the beam than is scattered into it. Thus, the forward scattering…
High levels of exozodiacal dust have been observed in the inner regions of a large fraction of main sequence stars. Given the short lifetime of the observed small dust grains, these 'exozodis' are difficult to explain, especially for old…
This paper investigates whether an isotropic zodiacal light from the outer Solar system can account for the detected background excess in near-infrared. Assuming that interplanetary dust particles are distributed in a thin spherical shell…
Comets have been invoked in numerous studies as a potentially important source of dust and gas around stars, but none has studied the thermo-physical evolution, out-gassing rate, and dust ejection of these objects in such stellar systems.…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…