Reflected light from sand grains in the terrestrial zone of a protoplanetary disk

William Herbst (), Catrina M. Hamilton, Katherine LeDuc, Joshua N. Winn, Christopher M. Johns-Krull, Reinhard Mundt and Mansur Ibrahimov
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William Herbst: Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 06459, USA
Catrina M. Hamilton: Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013, USA
Katherine LeDuc: Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 06459, USA
Joshua N. Winn: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
Christopher M. Johns-Krull: Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA
Reinhard Mundt: Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Mansur Ibrahimov: Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, Astronomicheskaya 33, 700052 Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Nature, 2008, vol. 452, issue 7184, 194-197

Abstract: Early signs of new planets The formation of Earth-like planets is thought to start with the coagulation of interstellar grains that are only about 1 µm in diameter to form millimetre (sand), centimetre (pebble) and metre-sized (boulder) objects relatively rapidly. The prospect of observing such small objects in a protoplanetary disk seems pretty remote, but the combination of reflectance spectroscopy and the fortuitous geometry of the dust disk in the KH 15D eclipsing binary system has provided an indirect view of the process. The spectra of the light reflected from the disk are consistent with the presence of sand grains that have grown to about a millimetre in size or larger in the terrestrial zone of the host star.

Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1038/nature06671

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