Related papers: Water ice in the debris disk around HD 181327
The water ice or snow line is one of the key properties of protoplanetary disks that determines the water content of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone. Its location is determined by the properties of the star, the mass accretion…
The Spitzer Space Telescope has advanced debris disk science tremendously with a wealth of information on debris disks around nearby A, F, G, K and M stars at 24 and 70 microns with the MIPS photometer and at 8-34 microns with IRS. Here we…
The increased sensitivity of millimeter-wave facilities now makes possible the detection of low amounts of gas in debris disks. Some of the gas-rich debris disks harbor peculiar properties, with possible pristine gas and secondary generated…
Asteroids and comets (planetesimals) are created in gas- and dust-rich protoplanetary discs. The presence of these planetesimals around main-sequence stars is usually inferred from the detection of excess continuum emission at infrared…
Laboratory results of the optical properties of vapor-deposited water ice, specifically the refractive index and extinction coefficient, are available mainly for a selective set of wavelengths and a limited number of deposition…
Photoevaporation is an important dispersal mechanism for protoplanetary disks. We conduct hydrodynamic simulations coupled with ray-tracing radiative transfer and consistent thermochemistry to study photoevaporative winds driven by…
PDS 453 is a rare highly inclined disk where the stellar photosphere is seen at grazing incidence on the disk surface. Our goal is take advantage of this geometry to constrain the structure and composition of this disk, in particular the…
Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…
The D/H ratios of carbonaceous chondrites, believed to reflect that of water in the inner early solar system, are intermediate between the protosolar value and that of most comets. The isotopic composition of cometary water has been…
Water megamasers from circumnuclear disks in galaxy centers provide the most accurate measurements of supermassive black hole masses and uniquely probe the sub-parsec accretion processes. At the same time, these systems offer independent…
A snow-line is the region of a protoplanetary disk at which a major volatile, such as water or carbon monoxide, reaches its condensation temperature. Snow-lines play a crucial role in disk evolution by promoting the rapid growth of…
The water snowline in circumstellar disks is a crucial component in planet formation, but direct observational constraints on its location remain sparse due to the difficulty of observing water in both young embedded and mature…
The Earth's ocean mass is only 2.3 x 10^{-4} of the whole planet mass. Even including water in the interior, it would be at most 10^{-3}-10^{-2}. Ancient Mars may have had a similar or slightly smaller water fraction. It is important to…
James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec infrared imaging spectrometer observed the outer solar system dwarf planets Eris and Makemake in reflected sunlight at wavelengths spanning 1 through 5 microns. Both objects have high albedo surfaces…
The number of stars that are known to have debris disks is greater than that of stars known to harbour planets. These disks are detected because dust is created in the destruction of planetesimals in the disks much in the same way that dust…
We report the detection of water ice in the Centaur 2060 Chiron, based on near-infrared spectra (1.0 - 2.5 micron) taken with the 3.8-meter United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and the 10-meter Keck Telescope. The appearance of this…
Debris disks are optically thin, almost gas-free dusty disks observed around a significant fraction of main-sequence stars older than about 10 Myr. Since the circumstellar dust is short-lived, the very existence of these disks is considered…
We present optical spectra of (24) Themis and (65) Cybele, two large main-belt asteroids on which exposed water ice has recently been reported. No emission lines, expected from resonance fluorescence in gas sublimated from the ice, were…
Debris belts on the periphery of planetary systems, encompassing the region occupied by planetary orbits, are massive analogues of the Solar system's Kuiper belt. They are detected by thermal emission of dust released in collisions amongst…
The optical properties of ice in the far infrared are important for models of protoplanetary and debris disks. In this report we derive a new set of data for the absorption (represented by the imaginary part of the refractive index…