Apocenter glow in eccentric debris disks: implications for Fomalhaut and epsilon Eridani

Abstract

Debris disks often take the form of eccentric rings with azimuthal asymmetries in surface brightness. Such disks are often described as showing "pericenter glow", an enhancement of the disk brightness in regions nearest the central star. At long wavelengths, however, the disk apocenters should appear brighter than their pericenters: in the long wavelength limit, we find the apocenter/pericenter flux ratio scales as 1+e for disk eccentricity e. We produce new models of this "apocenter glow" to explore its causes and wavelength dependence and study its potential as a probe of dust grain properties. Based on our models, we argue that several far-infrared and (sub)millimeter images of the Fomalhaut and epsilon Eridani debris rings obtained with Herschel, JCMT, SHARC II, ALMA, and ATCA should be reinterpreted as suggestions or examples of apocenter glow. This reinterpretation yields new constraints on the disks' dust grain properties and size distributions.

20 pages, 7 figures; accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (5)

• STIS Imaging of the HR 4796A Circumstellar Debris Ring
• Discovery of an 86 AU Radius Debris Ring Around HD 181327
• Herschel images of Fomalhaut. An extrasolar Kuiper Belt at the height of its dynamical activity
• Dynamical evolution of an eccentric planet and a less massive debris disc
• MAMBO image of the debris disk around epsilon Eridani : robustness of the azimuthal structure

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