An improved model of the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk

TL;DR

This study models the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt dust disk, integrating observational constraints and physical processes to predict its properties and detectability, revealing a faint, transport-dominated disk with minimal impact from planets or sublimation.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive collisional and dynamical model of the EKB dust disk constrained by in-situ and remote observations, highlighting the importance of small bodies and the disk's faintness.

Findings

EKB dust disk is transport-dominated or intermediate in regime.

Optical depth of the disk is approximately 10^-6 beyond 10 AU.

Spectral energy distribution peaks at 40-50 micrometers with flux below detection thresholds.

Abstract

(Abridged) We access the expected EKB dust disk properties by modeling. We treat the debiased population of the known transneptunian objects (TNOs) as parent bodies and generate the dust with our collisional code. The resulting dust distributions are modified to take into account the influence of gravitational scattering and resonance trapping by planets on migrating dust grains as well as the effect of sublimation. A difficulty is that the amount and distribution of dust are largely determined by sub-kilometer-sized bodies. These are directly unobservable, and their properties cannot be accessed by collisional modeling, because objects larger than 10...60m in the present-day EKB are not in a collisional equilibrium. To place additional constraints, we use in-situ measurements of the New Horizons spacecraft within 20AU. We show that the TNO population has to have a break in the size distribution at s<70km. However, even this still leaves us with several models that all correctly reproduce a nearly constant dust impact rates in the region of giant planet orbits and do not violate the constraints from the non-detection of the EKB dust thermal emission by the COBE spacecraft. The modeled EKB dust disks, which conform to the observational constraints, can either be transport-dominated or intermediate between the transport-dominated and collision-dominated regime. The in-plane optical depth of such disks is tau(r>10AU)~10^-6 and their fractional luminosity is f_d~10^-7. Planets and sublimation are found to have little effect on dust impact fluxes and dust thermal emission. The spectral energy distribution of an EKB analog, as would be seen from 10pc distance, peaks at wavelengths of 40...50\mum at F~0.5mJy, which is less than 1% of the photospheric flux at those wavelengths. Therefore, exact EKB analogs cannot be detected with present-day instruments such as Herschel/PACS.