The Statistics of Extended Debris Disks Measured with Gaia and Planck

Understand

Thermal emission from debris disks around stars has been measured using targeted and resolved observations.

• We present an alternative, likelihood-based approach in which temperature maps from the Planck CMB survey at 857 and 545 GHz are analyzed in conjunction with stellar positions from Gaia to estimate the fraction of stars hosting disks and the thermal emission from the disks.
• The debris disks are not resolved (or even necessarily detected individually) but their statistical properties and the correlations with stellar properties are measured for several thousand stars.
• We compare our findings with higher sensitivity surveys of smaller samples of stars.