Related papers: The dust grain size - stellar luminosity trend in …
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
The dust in the interstellar medium, that provides the material for forming stars - and circumstellar discs as a natural by-product - is known to have submicron sizes. As these discs are the sites of planet formation, those small grains are…
We argue that impact velocities between dust grains with sizes less than $\sim 0.1$ $\mu m$ in molecular cloud cores are dominated by drift arising from ambipolar diffusion. This effect is due to the size dependence of the dust coupling to…
Debris disc analysis and modelling provide crucial information about the structure and the processes at play in extrasolar planetary systems. In binary systems, this issue is more complex because the disc should in addition respond to the…
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.…
A correlation between proto-planetary disc radii and sub-mm fluxes has been recently reported. In this Letter we show that the correlation is a sensitive probe of grain growth processes. Using models of grain growth and drift, we have shown…
The presence of dusty debris around main sequence stars denotes the existence of planetary systems. Such debris disks are often identified by the presence of excess continuum emission at infrared and (sub-)millimetre wavelengths, with…
Instruments achieve sharper and finer observations of micron-in-size dust grains in the top layers of young stellar discs. To provide accurate models, we revisit the theory of dust settling for small grains, when gas stratification, dust…
Observations of dusty debris disks can be used to test theories of planetesimal coagulation. Planetesimals of sizes up to a couple thousand kms are embedded in these disks and their mutual collisions generate the small dust grains that are…
Dust constitutes only about one percent of the mass of circumstellar disks, yet it is of crucial importance for the modeling of planet formation, disk chemistry, radiative transfer and observations. The initial growth of dust from…
Motivated by the reported dearth of debris discs around M stars, we use survival models to study the occurrence of planetesimal discs around them. These survival models describe a planetesimal disc with a small number of parameters,…
Transitional disks represent a short stage of the evolution of circumstellar material. Studies of dust grains in these objects can provide pivotal information on the mechanisms of planet formation. Dissimilarities in the spatial…
In most debris discs, dust grain dynamics is strongly affected by stellar radiation pressure. As this mechanism is size-dependent, we expect dust grains to be spatially segregated according to their sizes. However, because of the complex…
I summarize recent surveys of protoplanetary disks at millimeter wavelengths and show that the distribution of luminosity, equivalent to the mass in small dust grains, declines rapidly. This contrasts with statistics on the lifetime of…
We have conducted the first comprehensive numerical investigation of the relative velocity distribution of dust particles in self-gravitating protoplanetary discs with a view to assessing the viability of planetesimal formation via direct…
Recent laboratory experiments have revealed that destructive collisions of icy dust particles may occur at much lower velocities than previously believed. These low fragmentation velocities push down the maximum grain size in collisional…
Context. Observations at sub-millimeter and mm wavelengths will in the near future be able to resolve the radial dependence of the mm spectral slope in circumstellar disks with a resolution of around a few AU at the distance of the closest…
Narrow dust rings observed around some young stars (e.g., HR 4796A) need to be confined. We present a possible explanation for the formation and confinement of such rings in optically thin circumstellar disks, without invoking shepherding…
We calculate the evolution of a star-forming cloud core using a three-dimensional resistive magnetohydrodynamics simulation, treating dust grains as Lagrangian particles, to investigate the dust motion in the early star formation stage. We…
In protoplanetary discs, the coagulation of dust grains into large aggregates still remains poorly understood. Grain porosity appears to be a promising solution to allow the grains to survive and form planetesimals. Furthermore, dust…