The dust bunnies under your bed might not appear to have much in common with faraway planets, but some astronomers think studying patterns in dust might be the key to identifying potentially habitable planets outside our solar system that are undetectable with current technology.
Dr. Marc Kuchner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told U of T astronomers in a colloquium earlier this month how dust from asteroid and comet collisions could be used to discover more extrasolar planets.
When dust is drawn into orbit around a star it often forms disks, and any planet in orbit around the same star interacts with that dust and debris to produce resonant signatures like rings and clumps, similar to the rings of Saturn.
Two huge clumps of dust are usually found trailing and leading a planet. In the case of planets with very elliptical orbits, two blobs form at opposite ends of the planet’s orbit, as is evident from studies of debris disks around Jupiter. If the pattern of those blobs of dust can be measured, they would give crucial data on the mass, location and eccentricity of the associated planet.
Since the dust clouds are much larger than the planets, they are easier to detect on Earth, using adaptive optics techniques like those used by AEOS (see above).
Kuchner is currently involved in NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder System. Learn more about NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder project at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/[searchword: Keck Interferometer]
