Modeling Planet-Induced Debris-Disk Asymmetries with N-Body Simulations
A method for inferring an unseen planet from the structure it carves in a debris disk. Students learn to treat a resolved scattered-light optical-depth map (here the 90-degree arc in HD 181327) as a target, run N-body simulations of disk dust perturbed by a hypothetical planet, and use a Bayesian search over the planet's mass and orbit to find the configuration that best reproduces the observed asymmetry. The workflow shows how a 2-5 Jupiter-mass planet on a circular orbit can sustain such a feature given a long enough dust collisional lifetime, why the asymmetry fades for larger grains, and how to predict the planet's sky position and observability.
MNRAS 000, 1–8 (2024) Preprint 3 January 2025 Compiled using MNRAS LATEX style file v3.0 A Planet
The debris disk around the 18.5 Myr F-star HD 181327 shows a roughly 90-degree arc of enhanced optical depth at about 84 au in Hubble/STIS scattered-light imaging. This paper tests whether an unseen …