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Finding Warm Debris Disks with WISE Around Bright Stars. Rahul I. Patel 1 , Stanimir Metchev 1,2 , Aren Heinze 1. Empirically Finding Excesses at 12 µm and 22 µ m.
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Finding Warm Debris Disks with WISE Around Bright Stars Rahul I. Patel1, Stanimir Metchev1,2, Aren Heinze1 Empirically Finding Excesses at 12 µm and 22 µm For the first time, we are able to detect small excesses even around bright solar neighborhood stars whose WISE fluxes are saturated. We do so by deriving and applying corrections to the fluxes of saturated stars in WISE. We search for W3 (12µm) and W4 (22µm) excesses from exozodi or asteroid belts around ~15,000 Hipparcos stars within 75 pc by using short minus long wavelength WISE colors. a) b) In a) we trace the W2-W4 vs. BT-VTdependence for our sample of stars using a running mean to estimate the photospheric contribution to the WISE colors. We create a color SNR (ΣE) from the color excess (E[W2-W4]). The distribution in b) was used to calculate the 99.5% confidence level (green line) above which stars were chosen as candidate debris disks. How Common Are W3 and W4Excesses in 75 pc ? • Asteroid belt/Zodiacal Light analogs: 4% The incidence rates we derive for 12 µm and 22 µm excesses exceed previous determinations from WISE by virtue of our precise photometric calibration. Our incidence rates for 12 µm excesses agree with the most sensitive results from Spitzer, while our incidence rates for 22 µm excesses are 1.5-3x less sensitive to Spitzer’s estimates. • Kuiper Belt/Asteroid belt analogs: 96% • 220 stars < 75 pc with excess at 12 µmor 22 µm • 111 New detections at any wavelength • 45% increase of 10-30µm excesses • 25% increase in 75 pc debris disk census This work is supported by NASA Origins of Solar Systems through subcontract No. 1467483 Scan here to link to the paper for this work (Patel, Metchev, Heinze 2013, ApJS, 212,10 (ArXiv:1403.3435) 1Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University 2Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Western Ontario