A WISE View of IRAS Debris Disks: Revising the Dust Properties

TL;DR

This paper refines the dust property measurements of debris disks around stars using WISE data, improving upon IRAS-based estimates and identifying new infrared excesses, thereby enhancing understanding of planetary system formation.

Contribution

It introduces revised dust properties for IRAS debris disk stars using WISE data and identifies new mid-infrared excess stars, improving previous dust temperature and luminosity estimates.

Findings

Revised dust temperatures and fractional luminosities for IRAS debris disk stars.

Identified 17 stars with new mid-infrared excesses at 22 μm.

Found that some previous dust temperature estimates were overestimated.

Abstract

Debris disks around stars are considered as components of planetary systems. Constrain the dust properties of these disks can give crucial information to formation and evolution of planetary systems. As an all-sky survey, \textit{InfRared Astronomical Satellite} (\iras) gave great contribution to the debris disk searching which discovered the first debris disk host star (Vega). The \iras-detected debris disk sample published by Rhee \citep{rhe07} contains 146 stars with detailed information of dust properties. While the dust properties of 45 of them still can not be determined due to the limitations with the \iras\ database (have \iras\ detection at 60 $\mu$m only). Therefore, using more sensitivity data of \textit{Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer} (\wise), we can better characterize the sample stars: For the stars with \iras\ detection at 60 $\mu$m only, we refit the excessive flux densities and obtain the dust temperatures and fractional luminosities; While for the remaining stars with multi-bands \iras\ detections, the dust properties are revised which show that the dust temperatures were over estimated in high temperatures band before. Moreover, we identify 17 stars with excesses at the \wise\ 22 $\mu$m which have smaller distribution of distance from Earth and higher fractional luminosities than the other stars without mid-infrared excess emission. Among them, 15 stars can be found in previous works.