Abstract
AbstractA warm/hot dust component (at temperature 300 K) has been detected around 20% of A, F, G, K stars. This component is called ‘exozodiacal dust’ as it presents similarities with the zodiacal dust detected in our solar system, even though its physical properties and spatial distribution can be significantly different. Understanding the origin and evolution of this dust is of crucial importance, not only because its presence could hamper future detections of Earth-like planets in their habitable zones, but also because it can provide invaluable information about the inner regions of planetary systems. In this review, we present a detailed overview of the observational techniques used in the detection and characterisation of exozodiacal dust clouds (‘exozodis’) and the results they have yielded so far, in particular regarding the incidence rate of exozodis as a function of crucial parameters such as stellar type and age, or the presence of an outer cold debris disc. We also present the important constr...
Highlights
A warm/hot dust component has been detected around ∼20% of A, F, G, K stars
Exozodis are to be distinguished from their colder counterparts, called debris discs, for which the observed dust is produced by quasi steady state collisions in belts composed of planetesimals and large rocky bodies orbiting at tens of au [1,2]
The aim of this review is to assess our current understanding of exozodis that is warm or hot dust in the inner regions of planetary systems
Summary
A warm/hot dust component (at temperature >300 K) has been detected around ∼20% of A, F, G, K stars. In the remainder of the paper, we will make a distinction between warm exozodis that we detect in the mid-IR ( at about 10 μm, where habitable zone dust peaks) and hot exozodis that we detect in the near-IR (in the H or K-band) Note that these two populations can co-exist and this is not a physical boundary but rather an observational one (see Figure 1). In order to explain the rather ubiquitous presence of exozodis, a scenario that produces dust at a rate of ∼10−9 M⊕/yr is required [9] or a mechanism that increases the dust lifetime by orders of magnitude [e.g. 10] The full explanation may lie in a combination of mechanisms
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