Related papers: Hiding Dust Around $\epsilon$ Eridani
Deep HST broad-band images taken with ACS and WFPC2 of the giant ($\sim 1000$ AU diameter) dark silhouette proplyd 114-426 in the Orion Nebula show that this system is tilted, asymmetric, warped and photoevaporated. The exquisite angular…
(abridged) Debris disks around main sequence stars are produced by the erosion and evaporation of unseen parent bodies. AU Microscopii (GJ 803) is a compelling object to study in the context of disk evolution across different spectral…
With the MIPS camera on Spitzer, we have searched for far-infrared emission from dust in the planetary system orbiting pulsar PSR 1257+12. With accuracies of 0.05 mJy at 24 um and 1.5 mJy at 70 um, photometric measurements find no evidence…
Debris disks are thought to be sculptured by neighboring planets. The same is true for the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk, yet no direct observational evidence for signatures of giant planets in the Kuiper belt dust distribution has been…
Many debris discs reveal a two-component structure, with an outer Kuiper-belt analogue and a warm inner component whose origin is still a matter of debate. One possibility is that warm emission stems from an "asteroid belt" closer in to the…
Fomalhaut and epsilon Eridani are two young, nearby stars that possess extended debris disks whose structures suggest the presence of perturbing planetary objects. With its high sensitivity and stable point spread function, Spitzer/IRAC is…
Debris disks around main-sequence stars are believed to derive from planetesimal populations that have accreted at early epochs and survived possible planet formation processes. While debris disks must contain solids in a broad range of…
PDS 70b is the most robustly detected young planet imaged in the gap of a transition disk so far, found at a separation of ~195 mas (~22 au) from its host star and at a position angle of about 155 deg. This system is therefore a unique…
The young star AB Aurigae is surrounded by a complex combination of gas-rich and dust dominated structures. The inner disk which has not been studied previously at sufficient resolution and imaging dynamic range seems to contain very little…
We report MIRI-JWST coronagraphic observations at 11.3 and 15.5 mic of the debris disk around the young star HD 106906. The observations were made to characterize the structure, temperature and mass of the disk through the thermal emission…
Light echoes of flares on active stars offer the opportunity for direct detection of circumstellar dust. We revisit the problem of identifying faint echoes in post-flare light curves, focusing on debris disks from on-going planet formation.…
The Sun and >15 percent of nearby stars are surrounded by dusty debris disks that must be collisionally replenished by asteroids and comets, as the dust would otherwise be depleted on <10 Myr timescales (ref. 1). Theoretical studies show…
High-contrast imaging of debris disk systems permits us to assess the composition and size distribution of circumstellar dust, to probe recent dynamical histories, and to directly detect and characterize embedded exoplanets. Observations of…
AU Microscopii is a 12 Myr old M dwarf that harbors an optically thin, edge-on disk of dust. The scattered light surface brightness falls with projected distance b from the star as b^-a; within b = 43 AU, a = 1-2, while outside 43 AU, a =…
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…
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
The main-sequence solar-type star HD69830 has an unusually large amount of dusty debris orbiting close to three planets found via the radial velocity technique. In order to explore the dynamical interaction between the dust and planets, we…
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…
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 SEDs of some nearby stars show mid-infrared excesses from warm habitable zone dust, known as exozodiacal dust. This dust may originate in collisions in a planetesimal belt before being dragged inwards. This paper presents an analytical…