Needles in a haystack of galaxies: searching for debris disks in wide area extragalactic surveys

Debris disks are the leftovers of planetary formation, revealing collisional debris from exo-Kuiper belt objects. Traditionally debris disks are found by deep searches of known nearby stars within 100 pc, which places obvious limits on the sample sizes that can be studied. Here I will outline a search technique utilising deep multiwavelength extragalactic surveys that opens up a radically new search space for debris disks  and can reveal examples of disks that are too rare to exist in the local volume.

Speaker: 
Mark A. Thompson (Hertfordshire University)
Location: 
KIAA, 1st floor meeting room
Time: 
Fri, 2015-05-08 12:00 to 13:00