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V. M. Herrera, D. E. Backman (Franklin & Marshall College)
We present limits on amount of warm (terrestrial-temperature) dust around alpha Lyrae (Vega), alpha Piscis Australis (Fomalhaut), and epsilon Eridani. Our models are constrained by published infrared and sub-millimeter photometry and source sizes for these stars' well-known cool debris disks that may be young dense analogs to our solar system's Kuiper Belt. We calculate limits on density of material that might instead resemble our local mostly asteroid-produced zodiacal dust, within the debris disks' apparently empty central zones. We give thermal-IR flux limits at SIRTF wavelengths and optical / near-IR scattered light brightness limits corresponding to the model dust densities. We thank NASA and the F&M College Hackman research fellowship program for funding support.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: backman@ssa1.arc.nasa.gov