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Session: Stars, Planets and the Interstellar Medium

Name: Prof. Paul Kalas (UC Berkeley, Univ. of Crete & FORTH)
Coauthors: No coauthors were included.
Type: Oral
Title: New HST detections of complex outer structure for the dusty debris disks surrounding seven young planetary systems using STIS coronagraphy
Abstract:

Resolved images of dusty debris disks trace the physical location of solid material orbiting a star and may be dynamically perturbed by the gravitational influence of planets in the system. Here we used the HST/STIS coronagraph to survey ten young (10-25 Myr) planetary systems where prior near-infrared adaptive-optics observations discovered debris disks within two arcseconds of each star. The STIS optical observations are sensitive to the outer portions of each disk, and we detect seven of the these beyond two arcseconds radius. Unexpectedly, several systems have complex morphologies that were not evident in the ground-based images. We show how these new findings lend support to a recent dynamical model where debris disk dust is produced by a catastrophic impact between two planetesimals followed by the rearrangement of small grains due to radiation forces.