THE SPITZER INFRARED SPECTROGRAPH DEBRIS DISK CATALOG. I. CONTINUUM ANALYSIS OF UNRESOLVED TARGETS
- Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
- Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-4767 (United States)
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory, Code 667, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 (United States)
- Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723 (United States)
- Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400 005 (India)
During the Spitzer Space Telescope cryogenic mission, Guaranteed Time Observers, Legacy Teams, and General Observers obtained Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) observations of hundreds of debris disk candidates. We calibrated the spectra of 571 candidates, including 64 new IRAS and Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) debris disks candidates, modeled their stellar photospheres, and produced a catalog of excess spectra for unresolved debris disks. For 499 targets with IRS excess but without strong spectral features (and a subset of 420 targets with additional MIPS 70 μm observations), we modeled the IRS (and MIPS data) assuming that the dust thermal emission was well-described using either a one- or two-temperature blackbody model. We calculated the probability for each model and computed the average probability to select among models. We found that the spectral energy distributions for the majority of objects (∼66%) were better described using a two-temperature model with warm (T {sub gr} ∼ 100-500 K) and cold (T {sub gr} ∼ 50-150 K) dust populations analogous to zodiacal and Kuiper Belt dust, suggesting that planetary systems are common in debris disks and zodiacal dust is common around host stars with ages up to ∼1 Gyr. We found that younger stars generally have disks with larger fractional infrared luminosities and higher grain temperatures and that higher-mass stars have disks with higher grain temperatures. We show that the increasing distance of dust around debris disks is inconsistent with self-stirred disk models, expected if these systems possess planets at 30-150 AU. Finally, we illustrate how observations of debris disks may be used to constrain the radial dependence of material in the minimum mass solar nebula.
- OSTI ID:
- 22340280
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Vol. 211, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0067-0049
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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