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“Kuiper Belts Around Nearby Stars: Toward a Statistical Understanding Across the Stellar Mass Spectrum” Dr. Brenda Matthews Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics |
| The relatively recent discovery of excess infrared emission around main sequence stars by the IRAS satellite was quickly associated with dusty disks due to immediate imaging observations of the star Beta Pictoris. Despite this early success, however, significant progress in detecting and imaging other debris disks has occurred only recently. I will discuss why almost 20 years elapsed between the first and second optically resolved images of debris disks and how long wavelength observations contribute to our understanding of these objects and their evolution. I will particularly emphasize the disks detected around the M dwarfs TWA 7 and AU Mic, including recent HST polarimetry of AU Mic's disk. Although the statistics are still poor, a picture is emerging which suggests that disk evolution is not a monotonic function of spectral type, multiplicity or even time. Finally, I will describe how planned far-infrared and submillimetre surveys will address the issues of disk frequencyy, lifetime and composition. |