On the AU Mic debris disk: density profiles, grain properties and dust dynamics

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the AU Mic debris disk, examining its density, grain properties, and dust dynamics, and compares its features and behavior to the Beta Pictoris system.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive model of AU Mic's debris disk, including density profiles, grain size distribution, and the influence of stellar wind on dust dynamics, extending understanding of debris disk physics.

Findings

Most emission arises from an asymmetric, collisionally-dominated region near 35 AU.

Sub-micronic grains dominate visible scattering, but larger grains are underrepresented.

Stellar wind pressure can surpass radiation pressure, affecting dust distribution.

Abstract

We present the first comprehensive analysis of the AU Mic debris disk properties since the system was discovered by Kalas et al. (2004), and we explore whether the dynamical model, successful to reproduce the Beta Pic brightness profile could apply to AU Mic. We calculate the surface density profile of the AU Mic disk by performing the inversion of the near-IR and visible scattered light brightness profiles measured by Liu (2004a) and Krist et al. (2005), respectively. We discuss the grain properties by analysing the blue color of the disk in the visible (Krist et al. 2005) and by fitting the disk spectral energy distribution. We show that irrespective of the mean scattering asymmetry factor of the grains, most of the emission arises from an asymmetric, collisionally-dominated region that peaks close to the surface brightness break around 35 AU. The elementary scatterers at visible wavelengths are found to be sub-micronic, but the inferred size distribution underestimates the amount of large grains, resulting in too low sub-millimeter emissions compared to the observations. From our inversion procedure, we find that the V- to H-band scattering cross sections ratio increases outside 40 AU, in line with the observed color gradient of the disk. We show that a standard, solar-like stellar wind generates a pressure force onto the dust particles that behaves much like a radiation pressure force. With an assumed Mdot ~ 300 Mdot_sun, the wind pressure overcomes the radiation pressure and this effect is enhanced by the stellar flares. This explains the similarity between the Beta Pic and AU Mic brightness profiles. In both cases, the color gradient beyond 120 AU for Beta Pic and 35 AU for AU Mic, is believed to be a direct consequence of the dust dynamics.