An expert astronomical team led by DTM Carnegie fellow Chris Stark that also includes DTM astronomers Alan Boss, Alycia Weinberger and Brian Jackson, used the renowned Kepler telescope to search for dust clumps around stars with known transiting planets.  Stark developed a dust-detection model that shows what the transit signal of a dust clump trapped in a gravitational resonance with the planet should look like.  The observations were sensitive to dust disks about 20 times as dense as our solar system's zodiacal cloud.  Stark examined 106 transiting systems and did not detect any significant dust clumps. This non-detection suggests that there are no large amounts of dust in the systems and that any dust does not create significant noise in the process of detecting transiting planet signals.  This is important for future missions that aim to directly image extra-solar Earth like planets, as these smaller planets will have transit signals on the edge of detection.

Stark's paper will be in the March issue of the Astrophysical Journal.