Related papers: Debris disks around main-sequence stars
Debris disks, which consist of dust, planetesimals, planets, and gas, offer a unique window into the mineralogical composition of their parent bodies, especially during the critical phase of terrestrial planet formation spanning 10 to a few…
We have begun an observational program to search nearby stars for dust disks that are analogous to the disk of zodiacal dust that fills the interior of our solar system. We imaged six nearby main-sequence stars with the Keck telescope at…
Discs of gas and dust around Myr-old stars are a by-product of the star formation process and provide the raw material to form planets. Hence, their evolution and dispersal directly impact what type of planets can form and affect the final…
We propose an ecliptic Deep Drilling Field that will discover some 10,000~small and faint Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) --- primitive rocky/icy bodies that orbit at the outside of our Solar System and uniquely record the processes of planetary…
Our Solar System includes the Sun, eight major planets and their moons, along with numerous asteroids, comets, and dust particles, collectively known as the small Solar System bodies. Small bodies are relics from the birth of the Solar…
Circumstellar disks are an essential ingredient of the formation of low-mass stars. It is unclear, however, whether the accretion-disk paradigm can also account for the formation of stars more massive than about 10 solar masses, in which…
Many members of nearby young moving groups exhibit infrared excess attributed to circumstellar debris dust, formed via erosion of planetesimals. With their proximity and well-dated ages, these groups are excellent laboratories for studying…
In this paper we address the question whether star formation is driven by local processes or the large scale environment. To do so, we investigate star formation in collisional debris where the gravitational potential well and velocity…
The discovery of binaries in each of the major populations of minor bodies in the solar system is propelling a rapid growth of heretofore unattainable physical information. The availability of mass and density constraints for minor bodies…
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…
Using simple geometrical arguments, we paint an overview of the variety of resonant structures a single planet with moderate eccentricity (e < ~0.6) can create in a dynamically cold, optically thin dust disk. This overview may serve as a…
Over the past fifteen years, surveys mainly at millimeter wavelengths have led to the discovery of $\sim$20 gas-bearing debris disks, most of them surrounding young intermediate-mass stars. Exploring the properties and origin of this gas…
Debris discs are analogues to our own Kuiper belt around main-sequence stars and are therefore referred to as exoKuiper belts. They have been resolved at high angular resolution at wavelengths spanning the optical to the…
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…
The recent detections of extrasolar giant planets has revealed a surprising diversity of planetary system architectures, with many very unlike our Solar System. Understanding the origin of this diversity requires multi-wavelength studies of…
We present an analysis of debris disk data around Solar-type stars (spectral types F0-K5) using the steady-state analytical model of Wyatt et al. (2007). Models are fitted to published data from the FEPS (Meyer et al. 2006) project and…
The gap between two component debris disks is often taken to be carved by intervening planets scattering away the remnant planetesimals. We employ N-body simulations to determine how the time needed to clear the gap depends on the location…
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…
Recent observations have suggested that circumstellar disks may commonly form around young stellar objects. Although the formation of circumstellar disks can be a natural result of the conservation of angular momentum in the parent cloud,…
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…