_version_ 1866915737044516864
author Zawadzki, Brianna
Fehr, Anna
Hughes, A. Meredith
Mansell, Elias
Kittling, Jamar
Han, Yinuo
Hou, Catherine
Pan, Margaret
Milli, Julien
Olofsson, Johan
Pearce, Tim D.
Sefilian, Antranik A.
Nurmohamed, Aliya
Lee, Junu
Mpofu, Yamani
Bonduelle, Myriam
Booth, Mark
Brennan, Aoife
del Burgo, Carlos
Carpenter, John M.
Cataldi, Gianni
Chiang, Eugene
Ertel, Steve
Henning, Thomas
Jankovic, Marija R.
Kennedy, Grant M.
Kóspál, Ágnes
Krivov, Alexander V.
Lovell, Joshua B.
Luppe, Patricia
MacGregor, Meredith A.
Mac Manamon, Sorcha
Marino, Sebastian
Marshall, Jonathan P.
Matrà, Luca
Moór, Attila
Pérez, Sebastián
Weber, Philipp
Wilner, David J.
Wyatt, Mark C.
author_facet Zawadzki, Brianna
Fehr, Anna
Hughes, A. Meredith
Mansell, Elias
Kittling, Jamar
Han, Yinuo
Hou, Catherine
Pan, Margaret
Milli, Julien
Olofsson, Johan
Pearce, Tim D.
Sefilian, Antranik A.
Nurmohamed, Aliya
Lee, Junu
Mpofu, Yamani
Bonduelle, Myriam
Booth, Mark
Brennan, Aoife
del Burgo, Carlos
Carpenter, John M.
Cataldi, Gianni
Chiang, Eugene
Ertel, Steve
Henning, Thomas
Jankovic, Marija R.
Kennedy, Grant M.
Kóspál, Ágnes
Krivov, Alexander V.
Lovell, Joshua B.
Luppe, Patricia
MacGregor, Meredith A.
Mac Manamon, Sorcha
Marino, Sebastian
Marshall, Jonathan P.
Matrà, Luca
Moór, Attila
Pérez, Sebastián
Weber, Philipp
Wilner, David J.
Wyatt, Mark C.
contents Debris disks -- collisionally sustained belts of dust and sometimes gas around main sequence stars -- are remnants of planet formation processes and are found in systems ${\gtrsim}10$ Myr old. Millimeter-wavelength observations are particularly important, as the grains probed by these observations are not strongly affected by radiation pressure and stellar winds, allowing them to probe the dynamics of large bodies producing dust. The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) is analyzing high-resolution observations of 24 debris disks to enable the characterization of debris disk substructures across a large sample for the first time. For the most highly inclined disks, it is possible to recover the vertical structure of the disk. We aim to model and analyze the most highly inclined systems in the ARKS sample in order to uniformly extract the vertical dust distributions for a sample of well-resolved debris disks. We employed both parametric and nonparametric methods to constrain the vertical dust distributions for the most highly inclined ARKS targets. We find a broad range of aspect ratios, revealing a wide diversity in vertical structure, with a range of best-fit parametric values of $0.0026 \leq h_{\rm HWHM} \leq 0.193$ and a median best-fit value of $h_{\rm HWHM}=0.021$. The results obtained by nonparametric modeling are generally consistent with the parametric modeling results. We find that five of the 13 disks are consistent with having total disk masses less than that of Neptune (17 $M_{\oplus}$), assuming stirring by internal processes (self-stirring and collisional and frictional damping). Furthermore, most systems show a significant preference for a Lorentzian vertical profile rather than a Gaussian.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) III: The vertical structure of debris disks
Zawadzki, Brianna
Fehr, Anna
Hughes, A. Meredith
Mansell, Elias
Kittling, Jamar
Han, Yinuo
Hou, Catherine
Pan, Margaret
Milli, Julien
Olofsson, Johan
Pearce, Tim D.
Sefilian, Antranik A.
Nurmohamed, Aliya
Lee, Junu
Mpofu, Yamani
Bonduelle, Myriam
Booth, Mark
Brennan, Aoife
del Burgo, Carlos
Carpenter, John M.
Cataldi, Gianni
Chiang, Eugene
Ertel, Steve
Henning, Thomas
Jankovic, Marija R.
Kennedy, Grant M.
Kóspál, Ágnes
Krivov, Alexander V.
Lovell, Joshua B.
Luppe, Patricia
MacGregor, Meredith A.
Mac Manamon, Sorcha
Marino, Sebastian
Marshall, Jonathan P.
Matrà, Luca
Moór, Attila
Pérez, Sebastián
Weber, Philipp
Wilner, David J.
Wyatt, Mark C.
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Debris disks -- collisionally sustained belts of dust and sometimes gas around main sequence stars -- are remnants of planet formation processes and are found in systems ${\gtrsim}10$ Myr old. Millimeter-wavelength observations are particularly important, as the grains probed by these observations are not strongly affected by radiation pressure and stellar winds, allowing them to probe the dynamics of large bodies producing dust. The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) is analyzing high-resolution observations of 24 debris disks to enable the characterization of debris disk substructures across a large sample for the first time. For the most highly inclined disks, it is possible to recover the vertical structure of the disk. We aim to model and analyze the most highly inclined systems in the ARKS sample in order to uniformly extract the vertical dust distributions for a sample of well-resolved debris disks. We employed both parametric and nonparametric methods to constrain the vertical dust distributions for the most highly inclined ARKS targets. We find a broad range of aspect ratios, revealing a wide diversity in vertical structure, with a range of best-fit parametric values of $0.0026 \leq h_{\rm HWHM} \leq 0.193$ and a median best-fit value of $h_{\rm HWHM}=0.021$. The results obtained by nonparametric modeling are generally consistent with the parametric modeling results. We find that five of the 13 disks are consistent with having total disk masses less than that of Neptune (17 $M_{\oplus}$), assuming stirring by internal processes (self-stirring and collisional and frictional damping). Furthermore, most systems show a significant preference for a Lorentzian vertical profile rather than a Gaussian.
title The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) III: The vertical structure of debris disks
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12128