Continued Observations of Earth's Resonant Ring

Details Continued Observations of Earth's Resonant Ring Continued Observations of Earth's Resonant Ring

Jun 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005sptz.prop20075j&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #20075

Physics

Scientific paper

We propose continuing observations for a multi-wavelength study of the Earth's Resonant Ring. The unique Earth trailing orbit of Spitzer traverses this Resonant Ring - a heliocentric ring of dust particles at 1 AU. The dust particles in this ring, produced by the grinding down of asteroids in the main belt, spiral into the inner Solar System due to drag forces and are trapped into resonant orbits in the vicinity of Earth. Azimuthal structures in the ring result in a dust cloud that follows the Earth in its wake. This trailing dust cloud produces a flux asymmetry - the radiation in the direction trailing the Earth's orbital motion is higher than the flux in the leading direction by approximately 1.7 MJy/Sr (2-3%). The only confirmed detection of a structure in a disk caused by a known planet, it constrains the mass and location of a planetary perturber embedded in a circumstellar disk. As Spitzer starts to penetrate the trailing dust cloud, the next 1.5 years are critical because the dynamical model predicts that the flux asymmetry will increase dramatically to >7 MJy/Sr and then start to reverse in direction. This project, started in Jan 2004, has been monitoring the ring with MIPS TPM data. We will extend it to a multi-wavelength study with MIPS and IRAC - stare mode at the poles and 10 & 12 deg scans across the ecliptic to filter the asteroidal dust bands. Since the resonant trapping of particles into the ring is a function of particle size, these observations will constrain particle size-frequency distribution using our dynamical model of the ring. The study of Earth's resonant ring will(1) measure the variations of the local zodiacal foreground over the lifetime of Spitzer; (2) constrain the size-frequency distribution, and estimate the number density, of dust in the near-Earth interplanetary environment; (3) act as a case study for the formation and structure of resonant rings in debris disks, associated with the existence of planets embedded in nearby stars.

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