SIMBAD references

Extrasolar debris disks that are bright enough to be observed are dense enough to be collision-dominated; i.e., the small grains that produce their infrared excess have collisional lifetimes shorter than their Poynting-Robertson decay times. This paper describes a numerical code for the modeling of such disks, including accretion and gravitational stirring as well as disruptive collisions. A constraint relating the mass of a debris disk and the sizes of the largest embedded bodies to its luminosity is demonstrated. The collisional code is applied to the debris disk around HD 12039, which has been intensively observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The evolution in time of the disk's luminosity is computed for a range of initial disk masses and planetesimal sizes. The luminosity at a given age depends on both the initial disk mass and the initial size of the planetesimals. Luminosity decays more rapidly for massive disks due to the combination of collisional depletion of small bodies and their accretion by bodies too large to contribute to dust production. Disks with low initial masses evolve slowly and can maintain their luminosities for ∼ Gyr timescales. This behavior may explain the lack of correlation between stellar metallicity and the abundance of debris disks.