Related papers: Observational Constraints on Dust Disk Lifetimes: …
The imaging of disks around young stars presents extreme challenges in high dynamic range, angular resolution, and sensitivity. Recent instrumental advances have met these challenges admirably, leading to a marked increase in imaging…
(Abridged) The lifetime of protoplanetary disks around young stars limits the timescale when planets form. A disk dissipation timescale < 10 Myr was inferred from surveys providing the fraction of stars with disks in young stellar clusters…
I summarize recent surveys of protoplanetary disks at millimeter wavelengths and show that the distribution of luminosity, equivalent to the mass in small dust grains, declines rapidly. This contrasts with statistics on the lifetime of…
Dust emission at 8 micron has been extensively calibrated as an indicator of current star formation rate for galaxies and ~kpc-size regions within galaxies. Yet, the exact link between the 8 micron emission and the young stellar populations…
Young massive stars influence their surroundings from local to galactic scales, but the observational challenges associated with their distance and embedded nature has, until the recent decade, made high-resolution studies of these objects…
The Galactic disk retains a vast amount of information about how it came to be, and how it evolved over cosmic time. However, we know very little about the secular processes associated with disk evolution. One major uncertainty is the…
I present models of disk evolution around young binary stars. I show that the primary factor in determining circumbinary disk lifetimes is the rate of disk photoevaporation. I also find that photoevaporative clearing leaves a signature on…
Planet formation models rely on knowledge of the physical conditions and evolutionary processes in protoplanetary disks, in particular the grain size distribution and dust growth timescales. In theoretical models, several barriers exist…
We review the present knowledge of disk accretion in young low mass stars, and in particular, the mass accretion rate and its evolution with time. The methods used to obtain mass accretion rates from ultraviolet excesses and emission lines…
While the population of main sequence debris discs is well constrained, little is known about debris discs around evolved stars. This paper provides a theoretical framework considering the effects of stellar evolution on debris discs,…
The rapid depletion of dust particles in protoplanetary disks limits the time available for planetesimal formation, as solids are typically accreted onto the central star before dust particles can undergo substantial growth. Dust traps…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
We investigate the effects of stellar evolution and dust on measurements of stellar velocity dispersion in mergers of disk galaxies. $N$-body simulations and radiative transfer analysis software are used to obtain mass-weighted and…
Protoplanetary disks are dispersed by viscous evolution and photoevaporation in a few million years; in the interim small, sub-micron sized dust grains must grow and form planets. The time-varying abundance of small grains in an evolving…
Proto-planetary disc surveys conducted with ALMA are measuring disc radii in multiple star forming regions. The disc radius is a fundamental quantity to diagnose whether discs undergo viscous spreading, discriminating between viscosity or…
We have used the velocity dispersion as an age indicator to constrain the ages of a large sample of main sequence Vega-like stars in order to study the lifetimes and temporal evolution of the dust disks around them. We use HIPPARCOS…
Understanding the collapse of clouds and the formation of protoplanetary disks is essential to understanding the formation of stars and planets. Infall and accretion, the mass-aggregation processes that occur at envelope and disk scales,…
Observational data on the dust content of circumstellar disks show that the median dust content in disks around pre-main sequence stars in nearby star forming regions seem to increase from about 1 Myr to about 2 Myr, and then decline with…
The wide luminosity dispersion seen for stars at a given effective temperature in the H-R diagrams of young clusters and star forming regions is often interpreted as due to significant (~10 Myr) spreads in stellar contraction age. In the…
Most stars and thus most planetary systems do not form in isolation. The larger star-forming environment affects protoplanetary disks in multiple ways: gravitational interactions with other stars truncate disks and alter the architectures…