What SOFIA Observations Tell Us About Planetary Debris Disks
Steward Scientist Kate Su will be holding a press conference at the AAS meeting Jan 7. The title is "What SOFIA Observations Tell Us About Planetary Debris Disks." Here is the meeting abstract for her Friday AAS talk. We will have the press release when it's available.
Oral Talk: Nature of the Warm Excess in eps Eri: Asteroid belt or Dragged-in Grains
Kate Y. Su, George Rieke, Massimo Marengo, & Karl R. Stapelfeldt
Epsilon Eri and its debris disk provide a unique opportunity to probe the outer zones of a planetary system due to its young age (roughly 1 Gyr) and proximity (3.22 pc, the closest prominent debris disk by more than a factor of two). It is the Rosetta Stone for more distant exoplanetary debris systems and thus critical to understanding the mid-term evolution of our Solar System. From resolved images in the far-infrared and submillimeter along with spectra from 10-35 and 55-95 microns, the eps Eri disk was suggested to have a complex structure, with multiple zones in both warm (asteroid-like) and cold (KBO-like) components. Alternatively, the warm excess can also originate from small grains in the cold disk, which are transported inward by the combination of Poynting-Robertson and stellar wind drags. Here we present a SOFIA/FORCAST 35 micron image of the system, and provide additional constraints on the nature of the warm excess inferred from previous Spitzer and Herschel observations.
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