Measuring Debris Disks’ True Sizes
Resolved images of debris disks with Herschel reveal their true sizes, and test the assumptions used in unresolved observations.
Resolved images of debris disks with Herschel reveal their true sizes, and test the assumptions used in unresolved observations.
I’ve got pretty bad eyesight. If I take off my glasses and look at the flowers on my window sill, they look like a fuzzy yellow blob. But with glasses, the petals and the patterns cast on them come into focus. This is how I felt when looking at the new observations of the debris disk around AU Mic. Putting on our ALMA glasses, the fuzzy debris disk around AU Mic is sharpening into something surprisingly consistent with our own Solar System.