Planetary systems not only consist of the central star and the planets, but often also have planetesimals, asteroids, comets and a lot of dust around it. The latter form so-called debris disks, which can be observed with telescopes in the infrared range.
It was recently discovered that planetesimals may form through the gentle gravitational collapse of clouds of mm-sized dust aggregates (“pebbles”). Based on this, we will thus investigate the collision behavior and optical properties of pebble-pile bodies in debris disks. For this purpose, cylinders of pebbles compressed at various pressures between 10 kPa and 250 kPa are brought to collision in the laboratory drop tower at several speeds between 0.2 m / s and 12 m / s. The collisions of these two centimeter sized agglomerates are then evaluated with regard to the mass of the largest fragment. The results of these experiments will be used for collision models.
