Abstract
Abstract
Debris disks are scaled-up analogs of the Kuiper Belt in which dust is generated by collisions between planetesimals. In the collisional cascade model of debris disks, the dust lost to radiation pressure and winds is constantly replenished by grinding collisions between planetesimals. The model assumes that collisions are destructive and involve large velocities; this assumption has not been tested beyond our solar system. We present 0.″25 (≈2.4 au) resolution observations of the λ = 450 μm dust continuum emission from the debris disk around the nearby M dwarf AU Microscopii with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. We use parametric models to describe the disk structure, and a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) algorithm to explore the posterior distributions of the model parameters; we fit the structure of the disk to both our data and archival λ = 1.3 mm data (Daley et al. 2019), from which we obtain two aspect ratio measurements at 1.3 mm (h
1300 =
0.025
−
0.002
+
0.008
) and at 450 μm (h
450 =
0.019
−
0.001
+
0.006
), as well as the grain-size distribution index q = 3.03 ± 0.02. Contextualizing our aspect ratio measurements within the modeling framework laid out in Pan & Schlichting (2012), we derive a power-law index of velocity dispersion as a function of grain size p = 0.28 ± 0.06 for the AU Mic debris disk. This result implies that smaller bodies are more easily disrupted than larger bodies by collisions, which is inconsistent with the strength regime usually assumed for such small bodies. Possible explanations for this discrepancy are discussed.
Funder
Research Corporation for Science Advancement
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Subject
Space and Planetary Science,Astronomy and Astrophysics
Cited by
10 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献