Related papers: Extreme Variability of the V488 Persei Debris Disk
The most dramatic phases of terrestrial planet formation are thought to be oligarchic and chaotic growth, on timescales of up to 100-200 Myr, when violent impacts occur between large planetesimals of sizes up to proto-planets. Such events…
Because of proximity to the Galactic plane, reliable identification of members of the alpha Persei cluster is often problematic. Based primarily on membership evaluations contained in six published papers, we constructed a mostly complete…
Debris disks with extremely large infrared excesses (fractional luminosities $> 10^{-2}$) are rare. Those with ages between 30 and 130 Myr are of interest because their evolution has progressed well beyond that of protoplanetary disks…
Luminous debris disks of warm dust in the terrestrial planet zones around solar-like stars are recently found to vary, indicative of ongoing large-scale collisions of rocky objects. We use Spitzer 3.6 and 4.5 {\mu}m time-series observations…
Extreme debris discs are characterized by unusually strong mid-infrared excess emission, which often proves to be variable. The warm dust in these discs is of transient nature and is likely related to a recent giant collision occurring…
RZ Piscium (RZ Psc) is well-known in the variable star field because of its numerous, irregular optical dips in the past five decades, but the nature of the system is heavily debated in the literature. We present multiyear infrared…
A possible connection between the presence of large quantities of warm (T$\geq$200 K) circumstellar dust at youthful stars and the existence of wide-separation companion stars has been noted in the literature. Here we point out the…
Detectable debris discs are thought to require dynamical excitation (`stirring'), so that planetesimal collisions release large quantities of dust. We investigate the effects of the secular perturbations of a planet, which may lie at a…
The dynamics of planetesimals in the circumbinary debris disc of the quadruple star system HD 98800 are investigated. Evolving a spherical shell of test particles from a million years ago to the present day indicates that both coplanar and…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has excelled in imaging debris disks in the near-infrared. The GPI Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) imaged twenty-four debris disks in polarized $H$-band light, while other programs observed half of these disks in…
There is currently debate over whether the dust content of planetary systems is stochastically regenerated or originates in planetesimal belts evolving in steady state. In this paper a simple model for the steady state evolution of debris…
(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…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
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…
In this paper, we present results from a multi-stage numerical campaign to begin to explain and determine why extreme debris disk detections are rare, what types of impacts will result in extreme debris disks and what we can learn about the…
Extreme debris disks (EDDs) are rare systems with peculiarly large amounts of warm dust that may stem from recent giant impacts between planetary embryos during the final phases of terrestrial planet growth. Here we report on the…
Debris disk morphology is wavelength dependent due to the wide range of particle sizes and size-dependent dynamics influenced by various forces. Resolved images of nearby debris disks reveal complex disk structures that are difficult to…
Multi-epoch infrared photometry from Spitzer is used to monitor circumstellar discs at white dwarfs, which are consistent with disrupted minor planets whose debris is accreted and chemically reflected by their host stars. Widespread…
The nearby young star beta Pictoris hosts a rich and complex planetary system, with at least two giant planets and a nearly edge-on debris disk that contains several dynamical subpopulations of planetesimals. While the inner ranges of the…
The vertical thickness of debris discs is often used as a measure of these systems' dynamical excitation and as clues to the presence of hidden massive perturbers such as planetary embryos. However, this argument could be flawed because the…