Studies of Disks Around the Sun and Other Stars

This is a NASA Origins of Solar Systems research program, and this NASA Headquarters grant has now been transferred to a new grant at NASA GSFC (NAG5-4082). Thus the need for this 'Final Report' on a project that is not, in fact, complete. We are conducting research designed to enhance our understanding of the evolution and detectability of comet clouds and disks. This area holds promise for also improving our understanding of outer solar system formation, the bombardment history of the planets, the transport of volatiles and organics from the outer solar system to the inner planets, and to the ultimate fate of comet clouds around the Sun and other stars. According to "standard" theory, both the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are (at least in part) natural products of the planetary accumulation stage of solar system formation. One expects such assemblages to be a common attribute of other solar systems. Our program consists of modeling collisions in the Kuiper Belt and the dust disks around other stars. The modeling effort focuses on moving from our simple, first-generation, Kuiper Belt collision rate model, to a time-dependent, second-generation model that incorporates physical collisions, velocity evolution, dynamical erosion, and various dust transport mechanisms. This second generation model is to be used to study the evolution of surface mass density and the object-size spectrum in the disk.