We find that the initial dust masses in planetary debris disks are correlated with the metallicities of their central stars. We compiled a large sample of systems, including Spitzer, the Herschel DUNES and DEBRIS surveys, and WISE debris disk candidates. We also merged 33 metallicity catalogs to provide homogeneous [Fe/H] and sigma([Fe/H]) values. We analyzed this merged sample, including 222 detected disks (74 warm and 148 cold) around a total of 187 systems (some with multiple components) and 440 disks with only upper limits (125 warm and 315 cold) around a total of 360 systems. The disk dust masses at a common early evolutionary point in time were determined using our numerical disk evolutionary code, evolving a unique model for each of the 662 disks backward to an age of 1 Myr. We find that disk-bearing stars seldom have metallicities less than [Fe/H] = -0.2 and that the distribution of warm component masses lacks examples with large mass around stars of low metallicity ([Fe/H] < -0.085). Previous efforts to find a correlation have been largely unsuccessful; the primary improvements supporting our result are (1) basing the study on dust masses, not just infrared excess detections; (2) including upper limits on dust mass in a quantitative way; (3) accounting for the evolution of debris disk excesses as systems age; (4) accounting fully for the range of uncertainties in metallicity measurements; and (5) having a statistically large enough sample.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/621391 |
| Date | 29 July 2016 |
| Creators | Gáspár, András, Rieke, George H., Ballering, Nicholas |
| Contributors | Univ Arizona, Steward Observ |
| Publisher | IOP PUBLISHING LTD |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article |
| Rights | © 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. |
| Relation | http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/826/i=2/a=171?key=crossref.4baa688d9c50da975250f06baa0d8447 |
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