Planetary Debris Disks

(April 24, 2008) Dr. James Graham from the University of California at Berkeley presents “Planetary Debris Disks”. Planetary debris disks are circumstellar clouds of dust detected in young planetary systems. This dust is believed to be released by collisions between larger bodies such as comets, asteroids and even planets. Although this dust was discovered in the early 1980s, adaptive optics imaging from the Keck Observatory is now giving astronomers our first clear view of planetary debris disks in other planetary systems.