Related papers: Extrasolar Kuiper Belts
We have bandmerged candidate transiting planetary systems (from the Kepler satellite) and confirmed transiting planetary systems (from the literature) with the recent Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) preliminary release catalog.…
An unbiased search for debris discs around nearby Sun-like stars is reported. Thirteen G-dwarfs at 12-15 parsecs distance were searched at 850 $\umu$m wavelength, and a disc is confirmed around HD 30495. The estimated dust mass is 0.008…
The discovery of the first extra-solar planet surrounding a main-sequence star was announced in 1995, based on very precise radial velocity (Doppler) measurements. A total of 34 such planets were known by the end of March 2000, and their…
Exocomets are small bodies releasing gas and dust which orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first inferred from the detection of variable absorption features in stellar spectra in the late 1980s using spectroscopy. More…
The nature of the few known solar-mass stars simultaneously containing debris disks and planets remains an open question. A number of works have shown that this property appears to be independent of planetary masses as well as of stellar…
Almost all of the $>600$ known Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) have been discovered within 50 AU of the Sun. One possible explanation for the observed lack of KBOs beyond 50 AU is that the distant Kuiper belt is dynamically very cold, and thus…
Circumstellar disks of planetary debris are now known or suspected to closely orbit hundreds of white dwarf stars. To date, both data and theory support disks that are entirely contained within the preceding giant stellar radii, and hence…
Debris disks, comprised of planetsimal belts and the dust and gas produced by their mutual collisions, are the longest-lived phase of circumstellar disks. Typically much fainter in emission than protoplanetary disks, debris disks can be…
Dust particles observed in extrasolar planetary discs originate from undetectable km-sized bodies but this valuable information remains uninteresting if the theoretical link between grains and planetesimals is not properly known. We outline…
The Debris Disk Explorer (DDX) is a proposed balloon-borne investigation of debris disks around nearby stars. Debris disks are analogs of the Asteroid Belt (mainly rocky) and Kuiper Belt (mainly icy) in our Solar System. DDX will measure…
We present photometric ISO 60 and 170um measurements, complemented by some IRAS data at 60um, of a sample of 84 nearby main-sequence stars of spectral class A, F, G and K in order to determine the incidence of dust disks around such…
Planets embedded within dust disks may drive the formation of large scale clumpy dust structures by trapping dust into resonant orbits. Detection and subsequent modeling of the dust structures would help constrain the mass and orbit of the…
(Abridged) A numerical model of a circumstellar debris disk is developed and applied to observations of the circumstellar dust orbiting beta Pictoris. The model accounts for the rates at which dust is produced by collisions among unseen…
Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) are thought to be the remnant of the early solar system, and their size distribution provides an opportunity to explore the formation and evolution of the outer solar system. In particular, the size distribution…
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,…
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…
Spatially resolved scattered-light images of circumstellar (CS) debris in exoplanetary systems constrain the physical properties and orbits of the dust particles in these systems. They also inform on co-orbiting (but unseen) planets,…
The dust disk detected by Pioneer at a heliocentric distance of 18 AU is a fraction of the dust generated by the Kuiper belt outside 30 AU. New Horizons will find a very high flux of more than 10 hits per day for each square meter of…
We discuss the properties of several circumstellar debris disk systems imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer in a survey of young stars with known far-IR excesses. These dusty disks…
We have investigated effects of early stellar encounters on a protoplanetary disk (planetesimal disk) and found that they can explain the high eccentricities and inclinations observed in the outer part ($>42$AU) of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt…