Related papers: The Pseudo-zodi Problem for Edge-on Planetary Syst…
We aim to explore two exozodiacal dust production mechanisms, first re-investigating the Poynting-Robertson drag pile-up scenario, and then elaborating on the less explored, but promising exocometary dust delivery scenario. We developped a…
High levels of dust have been detected in the immediate vicinity of many stars, both young and old. A promising scenario to explain the presence of this short-lived dust is that these analogues to the Zodiacal cloud (or exozodis) are…
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…
Exozodiacal dust, warm debris from comets and asteroids in and near the habitable zone of stellar systems, reveals the physical processes that shape planetary systems. Scattered light from this dust is also a source of background flux which…
Accretion of interplanetary dust onto gas giant exoplanets is considered. Poynting-Robertson drag causes dust particles from distant reservoirs to slowly inspiral toward the star. Orbital simulations for the three-body system of the star,…
Recent interferometric surveys of nearby main-sequence stars show a faint but significant near-infrared excess in roughly two dozen systems, i.$\,$e. around $10\,\%$ to $30\,\%$ of stars surveyed. This excess is attributed to dust located…
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…
Dust absorption is invoked in a number of contexts for hiding a star that has survived some sort of transient event from view. Dust formed in a transient is expanding away from the star and, in spherical models, the mass and energy budgets…
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…
Earth-like exoplanets can create resonant structures in exozodiacal dust through mean motion resonances (MMRs). These structures not only suggest the presence of such planets, but also act as potential noise sources in future mid-infrared…
An infrared excess over the stellar photospheric emission of main-sequence stars has been found in interferometric surveys, commonly attributed to the presence of hot exozodiacal dust (HEZD). While submicrometer-sized grains in close…
Excess emission, associated with warm, dust belts, commonly known as exozodis, has been observed around a third of nearby stars. The high levels of dust required to explain the observations are not generally consistent with steady-state…
Directly imaging extrasolar terrestrial planets necessarily means contending with the astrophysical noise of exozodiacal dust and the resonant structures created by these planets in exozodiacal clouds. Using a custom tailored hybrid…
Dust grains migrating under Poynting-Robertson drag may be trapped in mean-motion resonances with planets. Such resonantly trapped grains are observed in the solar system. In extrasolar systems, the exozodiacal light produced by dust grains…
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…
Identification of habitable planets beyond our solar system is a key goal of current and future space missions. Yet habitability depends not only on the stellar irradiance, but equally on constituent parts of the planetary atmosphere. Here…
Hot exozodiacal dust (HEZD) found around main-sequence stars through interferometric observations in the photometric bands H to L is located close to the dust sublimation radius, potentially at orbital radii comparable to those of close-in…
We investigate the impact of a highly eccentric 10 $M_{\rm \oplus}$ (where $M_{\rm \oplus}$ is the Earth mass) planet embedded in a dusty protoplanetary disk on the dust dynamics and its observational implications. By carrying out…
Recent optical and submillimeter observations have begun to probe the existence of dust grains in the halos of spiral galaxies. I review our own work in this area which employs high-resolution optical images of edge-on spiral galaxies to…