Related papers: Debris Disk Composition: A Diagnostic Tool for Pla…
Observations of debris disks, the products of the collisional evolution of rocky planetesimals, can be used to trace planetary activity across a wide range of stellar types. The most common end points of stellar evolution are no exception…
When and how planets form in protoplanetary disks is still a topic of discussion. Exoplanet detection surveys and protoplanetary disk surveys are now providing results that allow us to have new insights. We collect the masses of confirmed…
We know little about the outermost exoplanets in planetary systems, because our detection methods are insensitive to moderate-mass planets on wide orbits. However, debris discs can probe the outer-planet population, because dynamical…
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…
Observations of circumstellar disks provide a powerful tool for our understanding of planetary systems dynamics. Analogs to the Solar System asteroid belts, debris disks result from the collision of the remaining solid material of the…
Structures observed in debris disks may be caused by gravitational interaction with planetary or stellar companions. These perturbed disks are often thought to indicate the presence of planets and offer insights into the properties of both…
Several hundred stars older than 10 million years have been observed to have infrared excesses. These observations are explained by dust grains formed by the collisional fragmentation of hidden planetesimals. Such dusty planetesimal discs…
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…
The architectures of debris disks encode the history of planet formation in these systems. Studies of debris disks via their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) have found infrared excesses arising from cold dust, warm dust, or a…
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…
Recent ALMA observations discovered consequent amounts (i.e., up to a few $10^{-1}\; \rm M_\oplus$) of CO gas in debris disks that were expected to be gas-free. This gas is in general estimated to be mostly composed of CO, C, and O (i.e.,…
A question central to understanding the origin of our solar system is: how do planets form in circumstellar disks around young stars? Because of the complex nature of the physical processes involved, multi-wavelength observations of large…
A clear understanding of the chemical processing of matter, as it is transferred from a molecular cloud to a planetary system, depends heavily on knowledge of the physical conditions endured by gas and dust as these accrete onto a disk and…
Transitional and pre--transitional disks can be explained by a number of mechanisms. This work aims to find a single observationally detectable marker that would imply a planetary origin for the gap and, therefore, indirectly indicate the…
Debris disks, which are optically thin, dusty disks around main sequence stars, are often found to have structures and/or asymmetries associated with planet-disk interactions. Debris disk morphologies can hence be used as probes for planets…
Irregular satellites are the minor bodies found orbiting all four Solar System giant planets, with large semi-major axes, eccentricities, and inclinations. Previous studies have determined that the Solar System's irregular satellites are…
Discs of gas and dust around Myr-old stars are a by-product of the star formation process and provide the raw material to form planets. Hence, their evolution and dispersal directly impact what type of planets can form and affect the final…
Since giant planets scatter planetesimals within a few tidal radii of their orbits, the locations of existing planetesimal belts indicate regions where giant planet formation failed in bygone protostellar disks. Infrared observations of…
We have collected a catalog of 1095 debris disks with properties and classification (resolved, planet, gas) information. From the catalog, we defined a less biased sample with 612 objects and presented the distributions of their stellar and…
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…