Debris disks, or exoKuiper belts, are collections of dust, planetesimals, and sometimes gas around distant stars, analogous to the Kuiper belt in our own solar system. Radio interferometry has enabled high resolution images of debris disks at millimeter wavelengths, which in turn allow detection of disk substructure. The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) is a large program conducted with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The primary goal of ARKS is to find and characterize structure in the radial and vertical distributions of solid bodies in a sample of 18 debris disks, using high resolution (>5 resolution elements across the disk) observations of their 340 GHz (0.88 mm) continuum emission. These data will quadruple the number of well-resolved debris disks, and allow for homogeneous analysis of substructure.
In this work, we detail the motivation for the project and highlight some basic results from the observations that have been conducted thus far. Furthermore, we present a new Python library for efficient parametric modeling of 3D density structure in debris disks. We compare the performance of our code with the previous implementation, and demonstrate its use on two systems from the ARKS sample, TYC 9340 and HD 76582. We find that these disks are smooth and axisymmetric, and our code produces results that are consistent with the disks' CLEAN images and extracted radial profiles.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Astrophysics","Debris disks","Exoplanets"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 33980