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The scattered light of debris disks

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Mathias Nowak.

Debris disks are analogues to the Kuiper belt in our solar system and are detected around at least 20% of main sequence stars. Extreme adaptive optics instruments have revealed exquisite details on debris discs, allowing to extract the optical properties of the dust particles such as the phase function, the degree of polarisation and the spectral reflectance. These are three powerful diagnostic tools to understand the physical properties of the dust population : the size, shape and composition of the dust particles. This can inform us on the population of parent bodies, also called planetesimals, which generate those particles through collisions. I will review here the disks where this information has been extracted, what was inferred, highlighting the differences and similarities between the dust properties in those systems. I will show how experimental physics but also numerical simulations and solar system science can instruct the field of debris disk science on how to interpret the dust phase functions. In my work at IPAG , we try to reproduce the scattering properties of the disk around HR4796 , using dust analogues measured in the lab. I will also report on the recent detection of an analogue to the beta Pictoris system, with a warped disk suggesting interactions with a giant planet on a misaligned orbit.

This talk is part of the Exoplanet Seminars series.

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