Fomalhaut’s Little Sibling Has a Debris Disk Too
A new debris disk is discovered by the Herschel Space Telescope around the red dwarf tertiary star in the famous Fomalhaut system.
Debris Disks and Stars Spin Together
Herschel observations reveal that debris disks are aligned with their stars’ equators, unlike some close-in transiting exoplanets.
Asteroid belt found in the Vega System
A new asteroid belt discovered around Vega makes this system look more similar to the Solar System than we had previous thought. The gap between the two belts around Vega may indicate the presence of multiple planets.
Astronomers like Easter egg hunts: studying a unique star system in the infrared
Astronomers like to find cool things. The first Earth-sized planet. The most distant galaxy yet. Two stars that merged while we watched. The coolness factor is certainly one reason why we keep at it – who wouldn’t want to be the first to find an Earth-sized planet, or the first human to see light from a galaxy that’s existed for billions of years? But there’s also a compelling scientific reason to search for these oddballs. This paper reports on the likely discovery of dust around a pair of binary stars.
A Cosmic Vanishing Act
The authors report on a young, Sun-like star with a debris disk of dust and larger rocks that has had the dust particles mysteriously vanish from the disk in a span of less than two years.
Finding dust grains (and planetesimals?) in a circumstellar disk
AU Mic is a low mass star that undergoes unpredictable brightening events, called flares. It’s located just 10pc and has a circumstellar disk. In this paper, Wilner et al. report on observations of the disk at millimeter wavelengths and find evidence for a planetesimal ring.