Related papers: Using warm dust to constrain unseen planets

The gap between two component debris disks is often taken to be carved by intervening planets scattering away the remnant planetesimals. We employ N-body simulations to determine how the time needed to clear the gap depends on the location…

Suggestions have been made that asteroid belts may be important both for the existence of life and perhaps even for the evolution of complex life on a planet. Using numerical models for protoplanetary discs we calculate the location of the…

The presence of debris disks around $\sim$ 1-Gyr-old main sequence stars suggests that an appreciable amount of dust may persist even in mature planetary systems. Here we report the detection of dust emission from 55 Cancri, a star with…

Exo-zodiacal dust, exozodi for short, is warm (~300K) or hot (up to ~2000K) dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems around main sequence stars. In analogy to our own zodiacal dust, it may be located in or near the habitable…

Observations point to a correlation between outer giants and inner sub-Neptunes, unexplained by simulations so far. We utilize N-body simulations including pebble and gas accretion as well as planetary migration to investigate how the gas…

Submillimeter and near-infrared images of cool dusty debris disks and rings suggest the existence of unseen planets. At dusty but non-imaged stars, semi-major axes of associated planets can be estimated from the dust temperature. For some…

Circumstantial evidence suggests that most known extra-solar planetary systems are survivors of violent dynamical instabilities. Here we explore how giant planet instabilities affect the formation and survival of terrestrial planets. We…

The cold outer regions of protoplanetary disks are expected to contain a midplane-centered layer where gas-phase CO molecules freeze out and their overall abundance is low. The layer then manifests itself as a void in the channel maps of CO…

A key challenge for protoplanetary disks and planet formation models is to be able to make a reliable connection between observed structures in the disks emission, like bright and dark rings or asymmetries, and the supposed existence of…

Giant planets are expected to form at orbital radii that are relatively large compared to transit and radial velocity detections (>1 AU). As a result, giant planet formation is best observed through direct imaging. By simulating the…

Theoretical formation models and exoplanet detection surveys indicate that systems with multiple giant planets are common. We investigate how multiple super-thermal mass planets embedded in a circumstellar disk shape the dust distribution…

We investigate the formation of multiple-planet systems in the presence of a hot Jupiter using extended N-body simulations that are performed simultaneously with semi-analytic calculations. Our primary aims are to describe the planet…

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…

Dust in debris disks is generated by collisions among planetesimals. The existence of these planetesimals is a consequence of the planet formation process, but the relationship between debris disks and planets has not been clearly…

(Abridged) Studies of debris discs have shown that most systems are analogous to the EKB. In this study we aim to determine how many IRAS 25um excesses towards A stars are real, and investigate where the dust lies. We observe with TIMMI2,…

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…

The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…

Exozodiacal dust is warm or hot dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems orbiting main sequence stars, in or around their habitable zones. The dust can be the most luminous component of extrasolar planetary systems, but…

Context: The K2V star eps Eri hosts one known inner planet, an outer Kuiper belt analog, and an inner disk of warm dust. Spitzer/IRS measurements indicate that the warm dust is present at distances as close as a few AU from the star. Its…

The radial transport, or drift, of dust has taken a critical role in giant planet formation theory. However, it has been challenging to identify dust drift pile ups in the hard-to-observe inner disk. We find that the IM Lup disk shows…