ALMA peers in on the curious case of one circumstellar disk
Amid all of the swirling chaos during star formation, the universe finds a way to order its diffuse gas into shining young stars. ALMA Science Verification observations give new insight.
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.
In the Shadow of a Circumstellar Disk
We know other stars have planets. We know that certain stars have circumstellar disks. We know that before there are planets, there must be a protoplanetary disk; we also know that these two states must be connected through a evolutionary path which includes planet formation.
What if–if we were just so lucky–we found a protoplanetary system that had a disk, that was aligned so perfectly, and that was bright enough, and ….
Watching Dust Stick, Bounce, and Break — from 30,000 ft
Some astrophysicists must work in space – or as close as they can get – to accomplish their research. This paper discusses an experiment studying how dust can stick together and form planetesimals.
Review Article: Protoplanetary Disks and Their Evolution
In a new review article, Jonathan Williams and Lucas Cieza at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) describe the life-story of protoplanetary disks from formation from collapsing molecular clouds to the end-state of a planetary system. Infrared telescopes like Spitzer and sub-millimeter radio telescopes like the the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Submillimeter Array (SMA), and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA) have greatly revolutionized the study of protoplanetary disks because they can probe the emission at the longer wavelengths where the disk emission is strongest.