演講資訊

摘要：

Alongside planets, asteroids and comets form in the gas- and dust-rich protoplanetary discs that surround young stars. These asteroids and comets (called planetesimals) lie in belts around their host star and produce dust in collisions or through sublimation, hence they are called "debris discs". Gravitational interaction between planetary companions and the dust-producing planetesimals sculpts the location and width of these debris discs, leading to visible signatures of planetary companions in the dusty debris.

Recent studies of resolved debris discs at millimetre wavelengths has revealed a trend in the radii of the discs with the stellar luminosity. The observed trend is consistent with the location of planetesimal formation being linked to the CO ice line in the primordial protoplanetary disc. Here I will report initital findings of the extension to that study, the Resolved Emission with ALMA and SMA Observations of Nearby Stars (REASONS) targetting 68 nearby debris discs, and an archival study of far-infrared wavelength observations by Herschel of over 100 resolved debris discs. Comparison of the far-infrared and millimetre studies shows the same trend present in both data sets, and evidence that the width of the debris belts being correlated with the presence of a perturbing planet.