Product Description
This is a AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSONAFB OH report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A740024. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: This research is a numerical investigation into the dynamical influences of planets on the dust disks surrounding young main sequence stars. Motivating this research effort are the observations of the Beta Pictoris circumstellar disk made by the UF Department of Astronomy's mid-IR team. These IR images show with unprecedented clarity the features and asymmetries of the inner < 100 AU, portion of the Beta Pictoris disk; the most interesting of which is the dramatic warping of the disk's mid-plane. Analyses of prior observations have suggested that the features are attributed to the presence of a planet or a planetary system. Past dynamic analysis has focused primarily on the presence of a single planet and the resulting perturbations on the dust disk through hydrodynamic or N-body analysis. This research will show that the type of features observed in these images, specifically the warping of the disk, can also be explained with a system of two (or more) planets and secular perturbation theory while using more plausible assumptions than did other models. |
