IMAGES: Hubble images and illustrative graphics are available at http://hubblesite.org/news/2006/05/ & http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/download/

Berkeley ­ A survey by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of 22 nearby stars has turned up two with bright debris disks that appear to be the equivalent of our own solar system’s Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy rocks outside the orbit of Neptune and the source of short-period comets.

The debris disks encircling these stars fall into two categories – wide and narrow belts – that appear to describe all nine stars, including the sun, which are known to have debris disks linked to planet formation. In fact, the sharp outer edges of the narrow belts, such as the Kuiper Belt in our solar system, may be a tip-off to the existence of a star-like companion that continually grooms the edge, in the same way that shepherding moons trim the edges of debris rings around Saturn and Uranus.

Research astronomer Paul Kalas, professor of astronomy James Graham and graduate student Michael Fitzgerald of the University of California, Berkeley, along with Mark C. Clampin of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will report their discovery and conclusions in the Jan. 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The newfound stellar disks, each about 60 light years from Earth, bring to nine the number of stars with dusty debris disks observable at visible wavelengths. The new ones are different, however, in that they are old enough – more than 300 million years – to have settled into stable configurations akin to the stable planet and debris orbits in our own solar system, which is 4.6 billion years old. The other seven, except for the sun, range from tens of millions to 200 million years old – young by solar standards.

In addition, the masses of the stars are closer to that of the sun.

“These are the oldest debris disks seen in reflected light, and are important because they show what the Kuiper Belt might look like from the outside,” said Kalas, the lead researcher. “These are the types of stars around which you would expect to find habitable zones and planets that could develop life.”

Most debris disks are lost in the glare of the central star, but the high resolution and sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has made it possible to look for these disks after blocking the light from the star. Kalas has discovered debris disks around two other stars (AU Microscopii and Fomalhaut) in the past two years, one of them with the Hubble telescope, and has studied details of most of the other known stars with disks.

“We know of 100-plus stars that have infrared emission in excess of that emitted from the star, and that excess thermal emission comes from circumstellar dust,” Kalas said. “The hard part is obtaining resolved images that give spatial information. Now, two decades after they were first discovered, we are finally beginning to see the dust disks. These recent detections are really a tribute to all the hard work that went into upgrading Hubble’s instruments during the last servicing mission.”

The small sampling already shows that such disks fall into two categories: those with a broad belt, wider than about 50 astronomical units; and narrow ones with a width of between 20 and 30 AU and a sharp outer boundary, probably like our own Kuiper Belt. An astronomical unit, or AU, is the average distance between the Earth and sun, about 93 million miles. Our Kuiper Belt is thought to be narrow, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 AU to about 50 AU.

Most of the known debris disks seem to have a central area cleared of debris, perhaps by planets, which are likely responsible for the sharp inner edges of many of these belts.

Kalas and Graham speculate that stars also having sharp outer edges to their debris disks have a companion – a star or brown dwarf, perhaps – that keeps the disk from spreading outward, similar to the way that Saturn’s moons shape the edges of many of the planet’s rings.

“The story of how you make a ring around a planet could be the same as the story of making rings around a star,” Kalas said. Only one of the nine stars is known to have a companion, but then, he said, no one has yet looked at most of these stars to see if they have faint companions at large distances from the primary star.

He suggests that a stray star passing by may have ripped off the edges of the original planetary disk, but a star-sized companion would be necessary to keep the remaining disk material, such as asteroids, comets and dust, from spreading outward.

If true, that would mean that the sun also has a companion keeping the Kuiper Belt confined within a sharp boundary. Though a companion star has been proposed before – most recently by UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, who dubbed the companion Nemesis – no evidence has been found for such a companion.

A key uncertainty, Kalas said, is that while we can see many of the large planetesimals in our Kuiper Belt, we can barely detect the dust.

“Ironically, our own debris disk is the closest, yet we know the least about it,” he said. “We would really like to know if dust in our Kuiper Belt extends significantly beyond the 50 AU edge of the larger objects. When we acquire this information, only then will we be able to place our sun correctly in the wide or narrow disk categories.”

The star survey by Kalas, Graham, Fitzgerald and Clampin was one of the first projects of the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the Hubble, which was installed in 2002. The 22 stars were observed over a two year period ending in September 2004. The stars with debris disks detectable in visible light were HD 53143, a K star slightly smaller than the sun but about 1 billion years old, and HD 139664, an F star slightly larger than the sun but only 300 million years old.

“One is a K star and the other is an F star, therefore they are more likely to form planetary systems with life than the massive and short-lived stars such as beta-Pictoris and Fomalhaut,” he noted. “When we look at HD 53143 and HD 139664, we may be looking at astrophysical mirrors to our Kuiper Belt.”

The disk around the oldest of the two stars, HD 53143, is wide like that of beta-Pictoris (beta-Pic), which was the first debris disk ever observed, about 20 years ago, and AU Microscopii (AU Mic), which Kalas discovered last year. Both beta-Pic and AU Mic are about 10 million years old.

The disk around HD 139664, however, is a narrow belt, similar to the disk around the star Fomalhaut, which Kalas imaged for the first time early last year. HD 139664 has a very sharp outer edge at 109 AU, similar to the sharp outer edge of our Kuiper Belt at 50 AU. The belt around HD 139664 starts about 60 AU from the star and peaks in density at 83 AU.

“If we can understand the origin of the sharp outer edge around HD 139664, we might better understand the history of our solar system,” Kalas said.

The research was supported by grants from NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute.

NOTE: Paul Kalas can be reached at (510) 642-8285 or kalas@astron.berkeley.edu.