Related papers: The bright end of the exo-Zodi luminosity function…
Extreme debris disks (EDDs) are rare systems with peculiarly large amounts of warm dust that may stem from recent giant impacts between planetary embryos during the final phases of terrestrial planet growth. Here we report on 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-…
We report the discovery of four rare debris disks with warm excesses around F-stars, significantly increasing the number of such systems known in the solar neighborhood. Three of the disks are consistent with the predictions of steady state…
Using the SDSS DR7 spectroscopic catalog, we searched the WISE AllWISE catalog to investigate the occurrence of warm dust, as inferred from IR excesses, around field M dwarfs (dMs). We developed SDSS/WISE color selection criteria to…
There is currently debate over whether the dust content of planetary systems is stochastically regenerated or originates in planetesimal belts evolving in steady state. In this paper a simple model for the steady state evolution of debris…
The small class of known stars with unusually warm, dusty debris disks is a key sample to probe in order to understand cascade models and extreme collisions that likely lead to the final configurations of planetary systems. Because of its…
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…
Observations of debris disks allow for the study of planetary systems, even where planets have not been detected. However, debris disks are often only characterized by unresolved infrared excesses that resemble featureless blackbodies, and…
We present a sensitive search for WISE W3 (12um) and W4 (22um) excesses from warm optically thin dust around Hipparcos main sequence stars within 75pc from the Sun. We use contemporaneously measured photometry from WISE, remove sources of…
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…
By searching the IRAS and ISO databases we compiled a list of 60 debris disks which exhibit the highest fractional luminosity values (fd>10^-4) in the vicinity of the Sun (d<120pc). Eleven out of these 60 systems are new discoveries.…
Context. Detecting and characterizing circumstellar dust is a way to study the architecture and evolution of planetary systems. Cold dust in debris disks only traces the outer regions. Warm and hot exozodiacal dust needs to be studied in…
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.…
Habitable zone dust levels are a key unknown that must be understood to ensure the success of future space missions to image Earth analogues around nearby stars. Current detection limits are several orders of magnitude above the level of…
We describe a search for infra-red excess emission from dusty circumstellar material around 180,000 stars observed by the Kepler and WISE missions. This study is motivated by i) the potential to find bright warm disks around planet host…
Warm debris disks are a sub-sample of the large population of debris disks, and display excess emission in the mid-IR. Around solar-type stars, very few objects show emission features in mid-IR spectroscopic observations, that are…
Poynting-Robertson drag has been considered an ineffective mechanism for delivering dust to regions interior to the cool Kuiper belt analogues seen around other Sun-like stars. This conclusion is however based on the very large contrast in…
[abridged] The presence of large amounts of dust in the habitable zones of nearby stars is a significant obstacle for future exo-Earth imaging missions. We executed an N band nulling interferometric survey to determine the typical amount of…
Field star BD+20 307 is the dustiest known main sequence star, based on the fraction of its bolometric luminosity, 4%, that is emitted at infrared wavelengths. The particles that carry this large IR luminosity are unusually warm, comparable…