Thesis Supervisor: Johan Olofsson

Abstract

Debris disks are good analogs of the Kuiper belt of our solar system and are detected around ~20% of young stars (10-100 Myr old). With contemporary instruments (e.g. SPHERE at the VLT or ALMA), we can spatially resolve the debris disks and they most often appear as narrow rings with extended halos. It is important to note that we can only see the tip of the iceberg: we only detect small dust particles, with sizes ranging between a few microns up to 0.1-1 mm. These dust grains must be constantly produced in a collisional cascade initiated by much larger planetesimals that we cannot detect. The main motivation of the PhD project is to study the dynamics and the properties of the dust particles to better characterize the properties of the larger, unseen planetesimals.

The student will be working on high angular resolution observations of debris disks. The SPHERE data are already available and there will also be the possibility to perform multi-wavelength analysis, combining results from ALMA observations together with SPHERE data. The student will also be encouraged to submit observing proposals using other instruments such as GRAVITY at the VLT Interferometer. Codes are already available for the analysis to be performed but the student will have the liberty to adapt and improve them as they see fit.

References

Olofsson et al. (2023), A&A, 674A, 84O: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023A%26A...674A..84O/abstract

Olofsson et al. (2022), MNRAS, 513, 713O: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022MNRAS.513..713O/abstract

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