Largest imaging survey of dusty debris disks around stars completed

A new research has revealed that the largest and most sensitive visible-light imaging survey of dusty debris disks around other stars has been completed.

These dusty disks, likely created by collisions between leftover objects from planet formation, were imaged around stars as young as 10 million years old and as mature as more than 1 billion years old.

Survey leader Glenn Schneider from the University of Arizona said that it's like looking back in time to see the kinds of destructive events that once routinely happened in the solar system after the planets formed.

Schneider added that they found that the systems are not simply flat with uniform surfaces and these are actually pretty complicated three-dimensional debris systems, often with embedded smaller structures and some of the substructures could be signposts of unseen planets.

The astronomers used Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph to study 10 previously discovered circumstellar debris systems, plus MP Mus, a mature protoplanetary disk of age comparable to the youngest of the debris disks.

Irregularities observed in one ring-like system in particular, around a star called HD 181327, resemble the ejection of a huge spray of debris into the outer part of the system from the recent collision of two bodies.

Schneider continued that the most important message to take away is one of diversity and added that astronomers really need to understand the internal and external influences on these systems, such as stellar winds and interactions with clouds of interstellar material, and how they are influenced by the mass and age of the parent star, and the abundance of heavier elements needed to build planets.

The study is published in The Astronomical Journal.