An 11.6 Micron Keck Search For Exozodiacal Dust

Abstract

We have begun an observational program to search nearby stars for dust disks that are analogous to the disk of zodiacal dust that fills the interior of our solar system. We imaged six nearby main-sequence stars with the Keck telescope at 11.6 microns, correcting for atmosphere-induced wavefront aberrations and deconvolving the point spread function via classical speckle analysis. We compare our data to a simple model of the zodiacal dust in our own system based on COBE/DIRBE observations and place upper limits on the density of exozodiacal dust in these systems.

10 pages, figure1, figure2, figure3, and figures 4a-e

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Adaptive Optics Observations of Vega: Eight Detected Sources and Upper Limits to Planetary-Mass Companions
• A Search for Exozodiacal Dust and Faint Companions Near Sirius, Procyon, and Altair with the NICMOS Coronagraph
• A Survey of 10-Micron Silicate Emission from Dust around Young Sun-Like Stars
• High contrast imaging with Fizeau interferometry: The case of Altair