Stumbling over planetary building blocks: AU Microscopii as an example of the challenge of retrieving debris-disk dust properties

TL;DR

This study investigates how assumptions about dust grain shape influence the estimated properties of debris disk dust, using AU Microscopii as a case study, revealing that shape models significantly affect retrieved grain characteristics.

Contribution

It systematically explores the impact of grain shape and composition assumptions on debris disk dust property estimates, addressing degeneracies in modeling.

Findings

Grain shape assumptions alter retrieved dust properties.

Porous grain models were calculated across a range of sizes and compositions.

Results highlight the importance of realistic grain shape modeling in debris disk analysis.

Abstract

We explore whether assumptions about dust grain shape affect resulting estimates of the composition and grain size distribution of the AU Microscopii (AU Mic) debris disk from scattered light data collected by Lomax et al. (2018). The near edge-on orientation of the AU Mic debris disk makes it ideal for studying the effect of the scattering phase function (SPF) on the measured flux ratios as a function of wavelength and projected distance. Previous efforts to model the AU Mic debris disk have invoked a variety of dust grain compositions and explored the effect of porosity, but did not undertake a systematic effort to explore a full range of size distributions and compositions to understand possible degeneracies in fitting the data. The degree to which modelling dust grains with more realistic shapes compounds these degeneracies has also not previously been explored. We find differences in the grain properties retrieved depending on the grain shape model used. We also present here our calculations of porous grains of size parameters x = 0.1 to 48 and complex refractive indices (m = n+ik) ranging from n = 1.1 to 2.43 and k = 0 to 1.0, covering multiple compositions at visible and near infrared wavelengths such as ice, silicates, amorphous carbon, and tholins.