Secular Planetary Perturbations in Circumstellar Debris Disks

Details Secular Planetary Perturbations in Circumstellar Debris Disks Secular Planetary Perturbations in Circumstellar Debris Disks

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.1302h&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #13.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

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Circumstellar debris disks are likely the by-product of collisions among unseen planetesimals. Planetesimals are also the seeds of planets, so it is reasonable to expect that some debris disks might also harbor planets. In fact several such disks, like those orbiting beta Pictoris, Fomalhaut, etc., do appear to be perturbed by unseen planets orbiting within. The signatures of planetary perturbations include: central gaps, warps, and radial offsets in the disk's surface brightness. By modeling the disturbances observed in a circumstellar dust disk, one can then measure or constrain the masses and orbits of the planets that may be lurking within.
Of particular interest here are the warps and radial offsets seen in such disks, since these features can be due to secular planetary perturbations (Mouillet et al 1997, Wyatt et al 1999). Secular perturbations are the slowly varying gravitational perturbations that can excite orbital eccentricities and inclinations in a disk, and can also drive a slow orbital precession. Note that a dust grain's motion is completely analytic when suffering secular perturbations (Murray & Dermott 1999), which allows us to rapidly generate a synthetic image of a simulated disk as would be seen in scattered starlight or via thermal emission. And because this model is quite fast, our model can rapidly scan a rather large parameter space in order to determine the planetary configuration that may be responsible for the disk's perturbed appearance.
We have applied this dust-disk model to Hubble observations of the β Pictoris dust-disk (from Heap et al 2000), and will report on the planets that may be responsible for the warp seen in this edge-on disk. We will also apply the model to optical and IR observations of debris disks at Fomalhaut, AU Microscopii, and others, with additional results to be reported at conference time.

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