Debris Disks: Probing Planet Formation

Wyatt, M. C.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-55333-7_146

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 126 publications

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“…Such planets should not have a significant effect on the dust distributions investigated here. Of course, additional, as yet undiscovered, planets may be present (e.g., Marino et al 2018) and they may affect the discs in various ways(e.g., Ertel et al 2012;Bonsor et al 2018;Wyatt 2018). However, the masses and orbits of these planets are unknown.…”

Section: Other Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dust spreading in debris discs: do small grains cling on to their birth environment?

Pawellek

Moór

Pascucci

et al. 2019

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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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. Observing the dust, we can try to infer properties of invisible planetesimals. Here we address the question of what is the best way to measure the location of outer planetesimal belts that encompass extrasolar planetary systems. A standard method is using resolved images at mm-wavelengths, which reveal dust grains with sizes comparable to the observational wavelength. Smaller grains seen in the infrared (IR) are subject to several non-gravitational forces that drag them away from their birth rings, and so may not closely trace the parent bodies. In this study, we examine whether imaging of debris discs at shorter wavelengths might enable determining the spatial location of the exo-Kuiper belts with sufficient accuracy. We find that around M-type stars the dust best visible in the mid-IR is efficiently displaced inward from their birth location by stellar winds, causing the discs to look more compact in mid-IR images than they actually are. However, around earlier-type stars where the majority of debris discs is found, discs are still the brightest at the birth ring location in the mid-IR regime. Thus, sensitive IR facilities with good angular resolution, such as MIRI on JWST, will enable tracing exo-Kuiper belts in nearby debris disc systems.

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Section: Other Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dust spreading in debris discs: do small grains cling on to their birth environment?

Pawellek

Moór

Pascucci

et al. 2019

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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“…Hundreds of debris discs around single stars have been detected to date in far-IR surveys. Since the dust has a lifetime shorter than the age of the host star these observations imply that the dust contained in the debris disc is likely not primordial, at least for main sequence stars with age > 10 Myr (Wyatt 2018). The dust content is therefore thought to be replenished through planetesimal collisions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formation of the polar debris disc around 99 Herculis

Smallwood

Franchini

Chen

et al. 2020

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We investigate the formation mechanism for the observed nearly polar aligned (perpendicular to the binary orbital plane) debris ring around the eccentric orbit binary 99 Herculis. An initially inclined nonpolar debris ring or disc will not remain flat and will not evolve to a polar configuration, due to the effects of differential nodal precession that alter its flat structure. However, a gas disc with embedded well coupled solids around the eccentric binary may evolve to a polar configuration as a result of pressure forces that maintain the disc flatness and as a result of viscous dissipation that allows the disc to increase its tilt. Once the gas disc disperses, the debris disc is in a polar aligned state in which there is little precession. We use three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations, linear theory, and particle dynamics to study the evolution of a misaligned circumbinary gas disc and explore the effects of the initial disc tilt, mass, and size. We find that for a wide range of parameter space, the polar alignment timescale is shorter than the lifetime of the gas disc. Using the observed level of alignment of 3 • from polar, we place an upper limit on the mass of the gas disc of about 0.014 M ⊙ at the time of gas dispersal. We conclude that the polar debris disc around 99 Her can be explained as the result of an initially moderately inclined gas disc with embedded solids. Such a disc may provide an environment for the formation of polar planets.

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“…This is the basis of the approach taken in Fig. 6, which follows on from that used in Sibthorpe et al (2018) and Wyatt (2018). There we plot the parameter space of fractional luminosity vs blackbody radius for the four samples of F stars (BPMG, the 45 Myr group, the 150 Myr group, and DEBRIS), noting that the sub-mm disc radius is expected to be ∼ 2.5 times larger than the blackbody radius ( § 4.4).…”

Section: Fractional Luminosity Versus Radiusmentioning

confidence: 99%

A ∼75 per cent occurrence rate of debris discs around F stars in the β Pic moving group

Pawellek

Wyatt

Matrà

et al. 2021

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Only 20% of old field stars have detectable debris discs, leaving open the question of what disc, if any, is present around the remaining 80%. Young moving groups allow to probe this population, since discs are expected to have been brighter early on. This paper considers the population of F stars in the 23 Myr-old BPMG where we find that 9/12 targets possess discs. We also analyse archival ALMA data to derive radii for 4 of the discs, presenting the first image of the 63au radius disc of HD 164249. Comparing the BPMG results to disc samples from ∼45 Myr and ∼150 Myr-old moving groups, and to discs found around field stars, we find the disc incidence rate in young moving groups is comparable to that of the BPMG and significantly higher than that of field stars. The BPMG discs tend to be smaller than those around field stars. However, this difference is not statistically significant due to the small number of targets. Yet, by analysing the fractional luminosity vs disc radius parameter space we find that the fractional luminosities in the populations considered drop by two orders of magnitude within the first 100 Myr. This is much faster than expected by collisional evolution, implying a decay equivalent to 1/age2. We attribute this depletion to embedded planets which would be around 170 Mearth to cause a depletion on the appropriate timescale. However, we cannot rule out that different birth environments of nearby young clusters result in brighter debris discs than the progenitors of field stars which likely formed in a more dense environment.

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Debris Disks: Probing Planet Formation

Cited by 11 publications

References 126 publications

Dust spreading in debris discs: do small grains cling on to their birth environment?

Dust spreading in debris discs: do small grains cling on to their birth environment?

Formation of the polar debris disc around 99 Herculis

A ∼75 per cent occurrence rate of debris discs around F stars in the β Pic moving group

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