What Children Tell Us about Their Parents: From Visible Dust to Invisible Planetesimals in Debris Disks

Details What Children Tell Us about Their Parents: From Visible Dust to Invisible Planetesimals in Debris Disks What Children Tell Us about Their Parents: From Visible Dust to Invisible Planetesimals in Debris Disks

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.0406m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #4.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.392

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Various small body families in the solar system, together with dust they produce through mutual collisions and cometary activity, exemplify a non-planetary component of a planetary system, usually referred to as a "debris disk". Debris disks have been found to be a common phenomenon for main-sequence stars and, similar to the solar system, are believed to comprise planetesimal populations that have accreted at early epochs and survived possible planet formation. However, in contrast to the solar system, observations of extrasolar debris disks only show their dusty portion, whereas the dust-producing planetesimals remain invisible. We show how collisional models of debris disks can be used to "climb up" the ladder of the collisional cascade, from dust towards parent bodies, representing the main mass reservoir of the disks. Applying our approach to five sun-like stars known to harbor dust, we find that the observed excess emission in far-IR to sub-mm is compatible with debris disks collisionally sustained by "large Kuiper belts" of 0.2-50 earth masses (in the bodies up to 100 km in size) with radii of 100-200 AU, larger than thought before.
This research has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), projects Kr 2164/5-1 and Mu 1164/6-1, by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), project D/0707543, and by the International Space Science Institute (Bern).

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