A Catalogue of Interstellar Material Delivery From Nearby Debris Disks

TL;DR

This study models the trajectories of material from 20 nearby debris disks to estimate their contribution to interstellar objects entering our solar system, providing insights into their detectability and origins.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive simulation-based estimate of interstellar material from specific nearby debris disks and their potential detection within the solar system.

Findings

Expected flux of interstellar objects from these systems is around 2 within the inner solar system.

Current detection methods may take decades to observe meteors from these sources.

Particles from these systems tend to have low excess velocities, complicating their identification.

Abstract

We modeled the trajectories of material ejected from 20 nearby debris disk stars, including Epsilon Eridani (Ran), Vega, Fomalhaut, and Beta Pictoris, within a simulated Milky Way potential in order to quantify their contribution to the population of interstellar material entering the solar system. Our simulations show that material from each of these 20 systems is currently to be expected within our planetary system. We calculate expected fluxes of both macroscopic interstellar objects (ISOs, $\geq100~$m), which could be detected by telescopic surveys, and smaller meteoroids ($\geq200~$microns), which could manifest as meteors in Earth's atmosphere. We estimate that the ISO population originating from these debris disks and currently within the inner solar system is on the order of ~2, only a fraction of the expected total ISO population but nonetheless likely to be discovered by Rubin. Meteors in Earth's atmosphere from these systems are expected as well, but current methods, both radar and video, might require decades to collect even a single event. Our sample is found to be rich in relatively low excess velocity particles compared to the broader expected ISO population, which might make them harder to distinguish observationally from bound objects in some cases. These results provide a framework for linking detections of interstellar material to their astrophysical origins, offering new opportunities to probe the composition and dynamical history of nearby planetary systems.