Related papers: Giant Impacts and Debris Disk Morphology

Optically thin dusty disks around Main Sequence stars consist of debris from catastrophic collisions or from low erosion of long-lived planetesimals. Resolved observations of dusty disks have systematically evidenced asymmetries and annular…

High-resolution observations of several debris disks reveal structures such as gaps and spirals, suggestive of gravitational perturbations induced by underlying planets. Most existing studies of planet--debris disk interactions ignore the…

We use oblate axisymmetric dynamical models including dark halos to determine the orbital structure of intermediate mass to massive Coma early-type galaxies. We find a large variety of orbital compositions. Averaged over all sample galaxies…

The dust observed in debris disks is the result of a collisional cascade initiated from $\sim$ km-sized parent bodies. Using near-infrared to sub-millimeter observations, we can probe particle sizes spanning 2-3 orders of magnitude, and…

We present Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) observations of AU Microscopii, a young M dwarf with an edge-on, dusty debris disk. Integral field spectroscopy and broadband imaging polarimetry were obtained during the commissioning of GPI. In our…

Debris disks often take the form of eccentric rings with azimuthal asymmetries in surface brightness. Such disks are often described as showing "pericenter glow", an enhancement of the disk brightness in regions nearest the central star. At…

The HD 61005 debris disk ("The Moth") stands out from the growing collection of spatially resolved circumstellar disks by virtue of its unusual swept-back morphology, brightness asymmetries, and dust ring offset. Despite several suggestions…

Axisymmetric disks of eccentric orbits in near-Keplerian potentials are unstable to an out-of-plane buckling. Recently, Zderic et al. (2020) showed that an idealized disk saturates to a lopsided mode. Here we show that this apsidal…

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…

Disks of bodies orbiting a much more massive central object are extremely common in astrophysics. When the orbits comprising such disks are eccentric, we show they are susceptible to a new dynamical instability. Gravitational forces between…

Debris disc analysis and modelling provide crucial information about the structure and the processes at play in extrasolar planetary systems. In binary systems, this issue is more complex because the disc should in addition respond to the…

We demonstrate that shadows cast on a proto-planetary disk can drive it eccentric. Stellar irradiation dominates heating across much of these disks, so an uneven illumination can have interesting dynamical effects. Here, we focus on…

Unveiling the true nature of Dark Matter (DM), which manifests itself only through gravity, is one of the principal quests in physics. Leading candidates for DM are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) or ultralight bosons (axions),…

In this work, we used N-body simulations and a radiative transfer package to model the evolution of eccentric debris discs produced by giant impacts between planetary embryos. This included how the morphology and infrared emission of these…

The formation scenario of a gapped disk, i.e., transitional disk, and its asymmetry is still under debate. Proposed scenarios such as disk-planet interaction, photoevaporation, grain growth, anticyclonic vortex, eccentricity, and their…

We model mock observations of collisionless N-body disc-disc mergers with an axisymmetric orbit superposition program that has been used to model Coma ellipticals. The remnants sample representatively the shapes of disc-disc mergers…

A growing body of observational evidence suggests that the luminosity, photometric shape and amount of rotational or anisotropical support in elliptical galaxies may provide vital clues to how they formed. Elliptical galaxies appear to fall…

Scattered light images of circumstellar disks play an important role in characterizing the planet forming environments around young stars. The characteristic size of the scattering dust grains can be estimated from the observed brightness…

During the past decade circumbinary disks have been discovered around various young binary stars. Hydrodynamical calculations indicate that the gravitational interaction between the central binary star and the surrounding disk results in…

In our hierarchical structure-formation paradigm, the observed morphological evolution of massive galaxies -- from rotationally-supported discs to dispersion-dominated spheroids -- is largely explained via galaxy merging. However, since…