Production of Dust in Debris Disks Triggered by Comet Showers

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Scientific paper

We have studied the production of dust in a debris disk bombarded by comets expelled from the associated Oort cloud by a passing star. In a model similar to the solar system, we have studied the orbits of these comets, and tracked subsequent collisions with planetesimals in the Kuiper Belt. We have found that 0.1-1 lunar masses of dust or more can be generated by such a comet shower under favorable conditions. In the solar neighbourhood, these conditions should occur every few hundreds Myr, which makes this mechanism possibly responsible for the dusty debris disks observed around low-mass stars.
In addition, we compiled a catalogue of positions and velocities of 24304 stars to search for such close stellar encounters in the last million years among 44 stars known to have debris disks and among 112 stars with no detected disks. We found no correlation between dusty disks and close encounters but our catalogue is severely incomplete (80% incomplete at 20 pc) and no definite conclusion can be reached.

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