An 11.6 Micron Keck Search for Exo-Zodiacal Dust

Creators: Kuchner, Marc J.; Brown, Michael E.; Koresko, Chris D.

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Abstract

We have begun an observational program to search nearby stars for dust disks that are analogous to the disk of zodiacal dust that fills the interior of our solar system. We imaged six nearby main‐sequence stars with the Keck telescope at 11.6 μm, correcting for atmosphere‐induced wavefront aberrations and deconvolving the point spread function via classical speckle analysis. We compare our data to a simple model of the solar zodiacal dust based on COBE/DIRBE observations and place upper limits on the concentration of exo‐zodiacal dust around these stars.

Additional Information

© 1998 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 1998 August 7; accepted 1998 August 12. We are grateful to Dana Backman, Alycia Weinberger, Keith Matthews, and Eric Gaidos for helpful discussions, and to Keith Matthews and Shri Kulkarni for assistance with the observations. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. The observations reported here were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a scientific partnership among California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.

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