Dr Tim D. Pearce Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

‘Debris’ means objects in planetary systems that are smaller than planets (and not moons). Asteroids, comets, dust and dwarf planets are all debris. Much of my work involves ‘debris discs’, which are populations of debris orbiting stars, similar to the Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt in our Solar System. We can see debris discs around other stars too; the left figure above is an ALMA image of debris orbiting the star Fomalhaut, and the right figure is a Hubble Space Telescope image of debris around AU Microscopii. For a first introduction to debris discs, see my chapter in the undergraduate textbook Encyclopedia of Astrophysics (Pearce 2026).

Just as the number of known exoplanets has greatly increased over recent years, we now know that debris exists around a significant fraction of stars other than our Sun.

However, despite these advances there remain many unanswered questions. How and why do debris discs form? What is their relation to planets? How massive are they? What can they tell us about the early stages of planetary-system evolution? Much of my work focuses on these questions.

Planets exert gravitational forces, which can affect debris. Likewise, gravitational forces from debris can affect planets. This interaction produces warps, clumps, spirals and other features in debris discs, transports material between different regions of systems, and causes planet orbits to change. Interesting debris features are observed in many systems, but in most cases the planets responsible are too small to be detected.

One aspect of my work involves constraining the properties of these unseen planets, by examining features observed in debris. This allows us to probe planet parameters in the outer regions of planetary systems, where most planet detection techniques are ineffective. The above image shows a simulation of a planet interacting with debris, where the white ellipse is the planet’s orbit and the white point is the star. The planet has induced a spiral in the debris disc, which could potentially be observed.

Examples of my planet-debris-interaction work include Pearce et al. (2022a), Pearce & Wyatt (2014b) and Pearce & Wyatt (2015a).

A significant fraction of main-sequence stars host mysterious near-infrared emission. We think this arises from very small, very hot dust located very close to stars, but we don’t understand where it comes from or how it survives. I produce dynamical models to explain this phenomenon. Hot dust lets us probe dynamical processes and material transport in planetary systems, and may need to be mitigated in future missions to image Earth-like exoplanets.

Examples of my hot-dust work include Pearce et al. (2020) and Pearce et al. (2022b).

We can now image large planets far from their host stars, in the outer regions of planetary systems. However, constraining the orbits of these planets is difficult; the planets may take thousands of years to complete a single orbit, so even if we take multiple images over several decades, we would see the planet move a relatively small distance over that time. The above image shows the tentative planet Fomalhaut b, which moves over a very small fraction of its orbit during 8 years of observations.

Astronomers often try to determine the orbits of these planets, but it is unclear how best to do this without missing some potential orbits or making the solution appear more constrained than it actually is. I work on alternative methods to constrain planet orbits from imaging, which reveal all possible orbits and do not unfairly favour some solutions over others.

Examples of my orbital work include Pearce et al. (2015b) and Pearce et al. (2014a).