A neutron star in the Eye of Sauron?
Fomalhaut (a.k.a. the Eye of Sauron) has a dusty disk around it and an intriguing speck of light near the edge of the disk. But we don’t exactly know the nature of this object: Could it be… a neutron star?
Why you should be interested in dust
Embark on a dusty journey into the heart of debris disks – and why it’s important to talk dust if you want to understand planets.
Observing an Exo-Kuiper Belt
The authors of today’s paper wanted to use the best available instruments to image HR 8799’s outer debris disk, and look for whether “planet b” appears to have cleared out the disk, in the same way Neptune did for the Kuiper Belt.
How to destroy a debris disk
Planet-planet scattering can either be a good thing or a bad thing for the planetesimals caught in the crossfire. Like many things in life, the key is moderation. The authors of this paper try to figure out how many exoplanet systems with eccentric planets are likely to still have their debris disks after experiencing a planet-planet scattering event.
Stellar Flybys and Damping Disks: How to Excite an Exoplanet
Close encounters with a passing star can excite a planet into an eccentric or inclined orbit. But a circumstellar disk can damp a planet’s eccentricity and inclination. Who wins? Find out when the authors of this paper model a stellar flyby with two circumstellar disks!
Disk Detective: The Newest Astronomy Citizen Science Project
Finding circumstellar disks in the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer data is a tough job, but fortunately our brains are even better suited to the task than computers! You can help by lending your pattern-recognition skills to Disk Detective, the Zooniverse’s newest citizen science project.