Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2012
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21944503h&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #445.03
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
A model of a circumstellar debris disk is developed and applied to observations of the circumstellar dust orbiting beta Pictoris (Hahn 2010). This model accounts for dust production via collisions among unseen planetesimals, and grain destruction due to dust-dust collisions, with radiation pressure lofting the smaller grains out to r 1000 AU, which accounts for the disk's large spatial extent. Solving the rate equations that govern dust production and losses due to collisions then provides the dust abundance and collisional lifetime versus grain size, and the debris disk's optical depth and surface brightness versus distance from the star. Comparison to observations then yields estimates of the unseen planetesimal disk's radius, and the rate at which the disk sheds mass due to planetesimal grinding. Fitting the model to optical observations of beta Pic (Golimowski et al 2006) yields good agreement when the unseen planetesimal disk there is broad, spanning 75
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