2025/12/02 by Engler, N., Milli, J., Pawellek, N. +33
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.03128
openalex publication_date 2025/12/02 · openalex created_date 2025/12/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This study aims to characterize debris disks observed with SPHERE across multiple programs, with the goal of identifying systematic trends in disk morphology, dust mass, and grain properties as a function of stellar parameters. We analyzed a sample of 161 young stars using SPHERE observations at optical and near-IR wavelengths. Disk geometries were derived from ellipse fitting and model grids, while dust mass and properties were constrained by modified blackbody (MBB) and size distribution (SD) modeling of SEDs. The dynamical modeling was performed to assess whether the observed disk structures can be explained by the presence of unseen planets. We resolved 51 debris disks, including four new detections: HD 36968, BD-20 951, and the inner belts of HR 8799 and HD 36546. In addition, we found a second transiting giant planet in the HD 114082 system, with a radius of 1.29 R\rm Jup and an orbital distance of ~1 au. We identified nine multi-belt systems, with outer-to-inner belt radius ratios of 1.5-2, and found close agreement between scattered-light and millimeter-continuum belt radii. They scale weakly with stellar luminosity (R\rm belt ∝ L⋆0.11), but show steeper dependencies when separated by CO and CO2 freeze-out regimes. Disk fractional luminosities follow collisional decay trends, declining as t\rm age-1.18 for A and t\rm age-0.81 for F stars. The inferred dust masses span 10-5-1 M_⊕ from MBB and 0.01-1 M_⊕ from SD modeling. These masses scale as R\rm beltn with n>2 in belt radius and super-linearly with stellar mass, consistent with trends seen in protoplanetary disks. Analysing correlation between disk polarized flux and IR excess, we found an offset of ~1 dex between total-intensity (HST) and polarized fluxes. A new parametric approach to estimate dust albedo and maximum polarization fraction is introduced.