Welcome to Kate's HomeKate Y. L. Su
Associate Astronomer
MIPS/IR Group, Room #258
Projects:
- Diversity in Debris Disks: Snapshots of Planetary System Evolution
- The Master Sample of Spitzer Debris Disk Measurements
- NASA LBTI Exozodi Survey: Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems (HOSTS)
- Direct Imaging Exoplanet Survey: The LBTI Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt (LEECH)
Recent News
Space Telescopes Find Evidence
for Asteroid Belt around Vega. A UA-led team of astronomers has
discovered inner asteroid belts and outer comet-filled belts similar to the
arrangement found in our solar system around nearby stars Vega and Fomalhaut. A
wide gap between the inner and outer belts strongly hints at the existence of
yet undiscovered planets circling the bright stars. More...
Unsettled Youth: Spitzer
Observes a Chaotic Planetary System. HR 8799, one of the first of two
stars with imaged planets, also has a debris disk. New Spitzer imaging of the
system reveals a giant halo of fine dust, suggesting a similar kind of orbital
hyperactivity that our solar system experienced before the planets found their
way to the stable orbits they occupy today. See the complete press
release here.
Comets Clash at Heat of Helix Nebula. The central star of the
Helix Nebula, one of the clostest and best studied planetary nebulae, is a very
hot (~20 hotter than our sun) white dwarf, and is surprisedly found to show
infrared excesses, indictive of dust around this dead star. The dust must be
freshly generated by
Oort-cloud-like comets or Kuiper-Belt-like objects that survived the death of their sun. See the complete press release here.
Spitzer Sees Dusty Aftermath of
Pulto-Sized Collision. The debris disk around the nearby star Vega is
much better than eariler thought. It was probably caused by collision of
objects, perhasp as big as the planet Pluto, up to 2,000 kilometers (about
1,200 miles) in diameter. See the complete press
release here.
