Characterizing Debris Disks Around Young Suns

Details Characterizing Debris Disks Around Young Suns Characterizing Debris Disks Around Young Suns

May 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006sptz.prop30503r&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #30503

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Scientific paper

There is geological evidence that in the first few hundred Myr of the birth of the Solar System there was an epoch of strong bombardment caused by the collisions between growing planetesimals. Spitzer has the capability to probe that epoch in other stars by observing dust emission from debris disks around young solar system analogs. The MIPS GTO and FEPS Legacy teams have carried out a 24 micron survey of debris disks in a number of rich open clusters, with ages ranging from a few to 100 Myr. However, only a few of these clusters are close enough to detect fluxes in the MIPS bands to photospheric levels in solar mass stars; even fewer are close enough (<160 pc) to study disk properties by means of IRS spectroscopy. This proposal consists of two parts. 1) We will build on our previous investigation of the Pleiades core where we discovered a few solar analogs with MIPS excesses signaling debris disks. The excess fraction is tentatively bigger than among older field stars. To confirm this conclusion, we propose to observe the remaining F-G stars that are situated in the Pleiades corona and thus less affected by interstellar cirrus. 2) We will obtain IRS spectra for debris candidates in the Pleiades (100 Myr) as well as in two other intermediate-age clusters -- IC 2391 (50 Myr) and M47 (80 Myr). Disk spectra will allow us to constrain the disk geometry and other properties of debris dust, and to search for correlations of theses properties with the spectral type/mass of the host star. The IRS sample includes a range of spectral types from A to G stars. This program will provide the first representative sample of dust emission spectra at the intermediate age of 50-100 Myr, which likely corresponds to the final stages of terrestrial planet formation.

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