IPAC Astronomy Lunch Seminar

Observations of resolved debris disks show a spectacular variety of features and asymmetries, including inner cavities and gaps, inclined secondary disks or warps, and eccentric, sharp-edged rings. Embedded exoplanets could create many of these features via gravitational perturbations, which sculpt the disk directly and by generating planetesimal collisions.

We present the Superparticle-Method Algorithm for Collisions in Kuiper belts and debris disks (SMACK), the first code to simultaneously model the dynamical and collisional evolution of planetesimals in three dimensions. We use SMACK to investigate the effects of collisions on the morphology of a disk of planetesimals perturbed by a planet and apply our model to a number of resolved debris disks including Fomalhaut, beta Pictoris, and HR 4796. Including collisions can yield estimates for planet masses 5x smaller than collisionless models.