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Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…
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…
This paper reviews the dust content of the high redshift (z > 2) universe. Studies of the various "species" in the high-z "zoo" show that almost all have strong evidence for containing dust. The one exception, where the evidence is not yet…
We develop a physical model of the zodiacal cloud incorporating the real dust sources of asteroidal, cometary, and kuiperoidal origin. Using the inferred distribution of the zodiacal dust, we compute its thermal emission and scattering at…
The occurrence of a planet transiting in front of its host star offers the opportunity to observe the planet's atmosphere filtering starlight. The fraction of occulted stellar flux is roughly proportional to the optically thick area of the…
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…
Since the 1980's it has been becoming increasingly clear that the Solar System's irregular satellites are collisionally evolved. We derive a general model for the collisional evolution of an irregular satellite swarm and apply it to the…
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…
The eccentric orbits of the known extrasolar giant planets provide evidence that most planet-forming environments undergo violent dynamical instabilities. Here, we numerically simulate the impact of giant planet instabilities on planetary…
We study the influence of low-level water and high-level ice clouds on low-resolution reflection spectra and planetary albedos of Earth-like planets orbiting different types of stars in both the visible and near infrared wavelength range.…
A small number of young stellar objects show signs of a halo-like structure of optically thin dust. This halo or torus is located within a few AU of the star, but its origin has not yet been understood. A dynamically excited cloud of…
The HOSTS (Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems) survey searches for dust near the habitable zones (HZs) around nearby, bright main sequence stars. We use nulling interferometry in N band to suppress the bright stellar…
In recent years, evidence has been obtained that in the outer region of the Solar System (in the inner part of the Oort cloud), at a distance $\sim300-700$ AU from the Sun, there may be a captured planet or a primordial black hole. In this…
Radially compact protoplanetary discs (<=50 au) are ubiquitous in nearby star-forming regions. Multiple mechanisms have been invoked to interpret various compact discs. In this paper, we propose that fragmentation of fragile dust grains in…
The atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…
We investigate the effects on extrasolar giant planets [EGPs] of intense irradiation by their parent stars, describing the issues involved in treating the model atmosphere problem correctly. We treat the radiative transfer in detail,…
In 2006 Vega was discovered to display excess near-infrared emission. Surveys now detect this phenomenon for one fifth of main-sequence stars, across various spectral types and ages. The excesses are interpreted as populations of small, hot…
There is a long-standing discussion in the astrophysical/astrochemical community as to the structure and morphology of dust grains in various astrophysical environments (e.g., interstellar clouds, protostellar envelopes, protoplanetary and…
Protoplanetary disks often appear as multiple concentric rings in dust continuum emission maps and scattered light images. These features are often associated with possible young planets in these disks. Many non-planetary explanations have…
Presence of dust in galaxies removes half or more of the stellar energy from the UV-optical budget of the Universe and has profound impact on our understanding of how galaxies evolve. Measures of opacity in local galaxies are reviewed…