Related papers: The Pseudo-zodi Problem for Edge-on Planetary Syst…
Tiny meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere and inducing meteor showers have long been thought to originate partly from cometary dust. Together with other dust particles, they form a huge cloud around the Sun, the zodiacal cloud. From…
Clouds are often considered a highly uncertain barrier for detecting biosignatures on exoplanets, especially given intuition gained from transit surveys. However, for direct imaging reflected light observations, clouds could increase the…
This paper considers a simple model in which dust produced in a planetesimal belt migrates in toward the star due to P-R drag suffering destructive collisions with other dust grains on the way. Assuming the dust is all of the same size, the…
Clouds seem like an every-day experience. But -- do we know how clouds form on brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets? How do they look like? Can we see them? What are they composed of? Cloud formation is an old-fashioned but still…
Understanding the source of sub-stellar polarimetric observations in the optical and near-infrared is key to characterizing sub-stellar objects and developing potential diagnostics for determining properties of their atmospheres.…
Planetary companions to the source stars of a caustic-crossing binary microlensing events can be detected via the deviation from the parent light curves created when the caustic magnifies the star light reflecting off the atmosphere or…
We report the detection of small scale bending waves, also known as corrugations, in the dust lanes of five nearby edge-on disc galaxies. This phenomenon, where the disc mid-plane bends to become wavy, just as in warps but on a smaller…
Extrasolar debris disks are the dust disks found around nearby main sequence stars arising from the break-up of asteroids and comets orbiting the stars. Far-IR surveys (e.g., with Herschel) showed that ~20% of stars host detectable dust…
Recent observations of the size-frequency distribution of zodiacal cloud particles obtained from the cratering record on the LDEF satellite (Love and Brownlee 1993) reveal a significant large particle population (100 micron diameter or…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
Gamma-ray bursts are now known to be a cosmological population of objects, which are often accompanied by X-ray and optical afterglows. The total energy emitted in the afterglow can be similar to the energy radiated in the gamma-ray burst…
The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of some T Tauri stars display a deficit of near-IR flux that could be a consequence of an embedded Jupiter-mass planet partially clearing an inner hole in the circumstellar disc. Here, we use…
In many models of dusty objects in space the grains are assumed to be composite or fluffy. However, the computation of the optical properties of such particles is still a very difficult problem. We analyze how the increase of grain porosity…
We aim at understanding the formation of cloud layers in quasi-static substellar atmospheres. The time-dependent description presented in (Helling & Woitke 2006) is a kinetic model describing nucleation, growth and evaporation. It is…
The effect of solar or stellar radiation on dust particles' trajectories (the Poynting-Robertson drag) has been studied by a number of authors and applied to interplanetary dust dynamics in numerical computations. Meanwhile some important…
Transmission spectroscopy of Earth-like exoplanets is a potential tool for habitability screening. Transiting planets are present-day "Rosetta Stones" for understanding extrasolar planets because they offer the possibility to characterize…
Recent advances in astronomical instrumentation mean that we are now able to image the thermal emission from the disks of dust around main sequence stars that may be the fossil remnants of planetary formation. These observations imply that…
The effects of multi-layered clouds in the atmospheres of Earth-like planets orbiting different types of stars are studied. The radiative effects of cloud particles are directly correlated with their wavelength-dependent optical properties.…
Dust growth and its associated dynamics play key roles in the first phase of planet formation in young stellar objects (YSOs). Observations have detected signs of dust growth in very young protoplanetary disks. Furthermore, signs of planet…
[Abridged] Debris disks are extrasolar analogs to the solar system planetesimal belts. The star Fomalhaut harbors a cold debris belt at 140 AU as well as evidence of a warm dust component, which is suspected of being a bright analog to the…