Related papers: Debris Disks
Planet-forming disks turn from gas-rich, massive disks made of dust and gas into planetary systems containing only small amounts dust produced by collisions between smaller planetary objects like planetesimals, asteroids, or comets.…
In addition to planets and other small bodies, stellar systems will likely also host exozodiacal dust, or exozodi. This warm dust primarily resides in or near the habitable zone of a star, and scatters stellar light in visible to NIR…
A "minimum model" for debris disks consists of a narrow ring of parent bodies, secularly forced by a single planet on a possibly eccentric orbit, colliding to produce dust grains that are perturbed by stellar radiation pressure. We…
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…
Our understanding of the Solar System has been revolutionized over the past decade by the finding that the orbits of the planets are inherently chaotic. In extreme cases, chaotic motions can change the relative positions of the planets…
The dust produced in the Kuiper Belt (KB) spreads throughout the Solar System forming a dust disk. We numerically model the orbital evolution of KB dust and estimate its equilibrium spatial distribution and its brightness and spectral…
Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing…
Debris disk images show clumps, rings, warps, and other structures, many of which have been interpreted as perturbations from hidden planets. But so far, no models of these structures have properly accounted for collisions between dust…
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…
Debris disks -- collisionally sustained belts of dust and sometimes gas around main sequence stars -- are remnants of planet formation processes and are found in systems ${\gtrsim}10$ Myr old. Millimeter-wavelength observations are…
Drastic changes in protoplanets' orbits could occur in the early stages of planetary systems through interactions with other planets and their surrounding protoplanetary or debris discs. The resulting planetary system could exhibit orbits…
Dusty debris disks around main-sequence stars are signposts for the existence of planetesimals and exoplanets. From cross-correlating \hip stars with the \iras catalogs, we identify 146 stars within 120 pc of Earth that show excess emission…
Planetary satellites are an integral part of the heirarchy of planetary systems. Here we make two predictions concerning their formation. First, primordial satellites, which have an array of distinguishing characteristics, form only around…
Comets, asteroids and moons that orbit stars and planets exterior to our solar system are prefixed with "exo". While the existence of these objects is certain, our understanding of their physical properties, composition, and diversity is…
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…
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…
All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…
A debris disk is a constituent of any planetary system surrounding a main sequence star. We study whether close stellar encounters can disrupt and strip a debris disk of its planetesimals in the expanding open cluster of its birth with a…
The interstellar thick disks of galaxies contain not only gas, but significant quantities of dust. Most of our knowledge of extraplanar dust in disk galaxies comes from direct broadband optical imaging of these systems, wherein the dust is…
Meteorites are a remarkable resource. They capture the imagination of people worldwide with their spectacular entry through Earth's atmosphere as fireballs, and their exotic character of being pieces of other worlds. Scientifically, they…