Program: GS-2005B-Q-67

Title:Probing the Planet Zone of Confirmed Warm Debris Disks
PI:Mark Wyatt
Co-I(s): Rachel Smith, Jane Greaves, Bill Dent, Wayne Holland

Abstract

The few dusty debris disks that have been resolved show they are cool Kuiper belt-like rings. However, half the debris disk candidates exhibit little cool dust since their emission peaks at ~25um. This implies the warm disks are in the region we expect planets to have formed at 2-20AU. Little is known about these systems which could be the Kuiper belts of truncated planetary systems, or massive interplanetary asteroid belts, or systems in which planet formation is ongoing. We have surveyed 21 warm disk candidates using TIMMI2. We confirm the warm disk interpretation for 11 candidates by detecting dust emission centred on the star at 2-20AU. Seven of these are predicted to be extended at >0.4arcsec. Here we propose to image these 7 systems using TReCS to measure the radial location of the dust directly and to search for signatures of planetary perturbations in the disk morphology.

Publications using this program's data