Porous dust grains in debris disks

TL;DR

This paper explores how porosity affects dust grain behavior in debris disks, showing that porous particles have larger blowout sizes and lower temperatures compared to compact grains, impacting disk modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of porous dust grains' optical properties and their effects on blowout size and temperature in debris disks, providing new approximation formulas.

Findings

Porous particles have larger blowout sizes than compact ones.

Dust temperature decreases with increasing porosity.

Blowout size depends on stellar luminosity and porosity.

Abstract

When modeling the density and grain size distribution in debris disks, the minimum particle size is often significantly larger than the corresponding blowout size. While the dust particles are usually modeled as compact, homogenous spheres, we instead investigate the impact of porosity. The optical properties of porous particles are determined, and the influences of porosity on the blowout size and dust temperatures investigated. Using the method of discrete dipole approximation, we calculate the scattering and absorption cross sections of porous particles and derive the blowout size and the behavior of the dust temperature. We investigate the influence on the beta-ratio. Blowout sizes are calculated for various stellar luminosities and porosities, and an approximation equation is derived to estimate the blowout size as a function of these parameters. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of the porosity on the dust equilibrium temperature. The blowout size increases with the particle porosity and stellar luminosity. The dust temperature of porous particles is lower than the one of the compact spheres, in particular the temperature of blowout grains decreases for porous particles.