Related papers: An Empirical Planetesimal Belt Radius - Stellar Lu…
We compare quantitative estimates of the filamentarity of the galaxy distribution in seven nearly two dimensional sections from the survey against the predictions of LCDM N-body simulations. The filamentarity of the actual galaxy…
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.…
Millimeter observations of CO gas in planetesimal belts show a high detection rate around A stars, but few detections for later type stars. We present the first CO detection in a planetesimal belt around an M star, TWA 7. The optically thin…
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…
The study of the planet-debris disk connection can shed light on the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and may help predict the presence of planets around stars with certain disk characteristics. In preliminary analyses of the…
Aims. We analyze whether the effects of secular perturbations, originating from a substellar companion, on the dust dynamics in a debris disk can be investigated with spatially resolved observations. Methods. We numerically simulated the…
We show, by comparing observations with theoretical models, that the observed Kuiper Belt size distribution is well matched by coagulation models, which start from an initial planetesimal population with radii of about 1km, and subsequent…
The Kuiper belt is a remnant of the primordial Solar System. Measurements of its size distribution constrain its accretion and collisional history, and the importance of material strength of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). Small, sub-km sized,…
The similar orbital distances and detection rates of debris disks and the prominent rings observed in protoplanetary disks suggest a potential connection between these structures. We explore this connection with new calculations that follow…
Most planetary systems -- including our own -- are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system architecture. This paper develops an orbit-averaged formalism to characterize the cluster's…
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…
HD 181327 is a young F5/F6V star belonging to the Beta Pictoris moving group (12 Myr). It harbors an optically thin belt of circumstellar material at 90 AU. We aim to study the dust properties in the belt in details, and to constrain the…
We consider a belt of small bodies around a star, captured in one of the external or 1:1 mean-motion resonances with a massive perturber. The objects in the belt collide with each other. Combining methods of celestial mechanics and…
Planetesimal belts are invoked to explain the prolonged existence of debris disks. Important parameters to model their collisional evolution and to compute the dust production rate are the intrinsic probability of collision $P_i$ and the…
We present weak lensing results for 12 distant clusters determined from images obtained with the refurbished HST. We detect the signature of gravitational lensing in 11 of the 12 clusters; the clusters span nearly an order of magnitude in…
Some planetary systems harbour debris disks containing planetesimals such as asteroids and comets. Collisions between such bodies produce small dust particles, the spectral features of which reveal their composition and, hence, that of…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
The remarkably tight relationship between galaxy optical color and stellar mass-to-light ratio ($M_*/L$) is widely used for efficient stellar mass estimates. However, it remains unclear whether this low scatter comes from a natural order in…
The cold main classical Kuiper Belt consists of those non-resonant small solar system bodies with low orbital inclinations and orbital semi-major axes between 42.4 and 47.7 au. These objects likely formed \textit{in situ} and the population…
Recent sub-arcsecond resolution surveys of the dust continuum emission from nearby protoplanetary disks showed a strong correlation between the sizes and luminosities of the disks. We aim to explain the origin of the (sub-)millimeter…