Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21821807s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #218.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Our solar system is home to a tenuous disk of dust created by collisions between and outgassing of comets, asteroids, and Kuiper Belt objects. The inner AU of this disk, the zodiacal cloud, is gravitationally perturbed by Earth, which traps dust in exterior mean motion resonances to create an overdense circumsolar ring of dust. Future attempts to directly image extrasolar Earth-like planets will likely have to contend with analogous "exozodiacal" dust disks, which may contain similar asymmetric rings of dust. We model the interactions between planets and exozodiacal dust disks to predict the resonant ring structures created by single planets on circular orbits. We use a new collisional grooming algorithm to, for the first time, produce models of exozodiacal clouds that simultaneously and self-consistently handle dust grain dynamics, including resonant interactions with planets, and grain-grain collisions. The collisional grooming algorithm allows us to produce multi-grain size exozodi models that range in optical depth from one "zodi" to hundreds of zodis. We investigate a range of planet masses, planet semi-major axes, and dust compositions, and synthesize multi-wavelength images of our models at a variety of viewing geometries. Our results place realistic upper bounds on the degree of resonant structure and asymmetry to be expected in exozodiacal dust disks; this library of "worst case" exozodi models can be used to simulate the detectability of Earth-like planets embedded in structured debris disks using proposed telescopes.
Cahoy Kerri
Stark Christopher C.
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