Original title: Investigating Variability in Long-lived Protoplanetary Disks (>10 Myr) using NEOWISE
Gregory Mathews Ben, Jessy Jose, Jesús Hernández · September 2026
Planets form inside disks of gas and dust around young stars. Most of these disks vanish within 10 Myr, but some survive much longer. Scientists studied these rare, long-lived disks using NEOWISE telescope data to see if dynamic physical processes continue past that usual lifespan. As matter shifts, casts shadows, or warps inside the disk, its brightness flickers over time. The researchers tracked this infrared flickering across older disks. They found that these active brightness changes drop sharply after stars pass 25 Myr of age. Their work identified 23 new long-lived disk candidates that still host active, gas-rich material. This shows a rare group of planetary birthplaces can persist well into the later debris disk era.
Imagine you are watching a campfire at night. Most campfires burn out within a few hours, but a rare few keep smoldering for days. When you look closely at those long-lasting fires, you notice the flames flicker irregularly, as if something inside is shifting the logs. In this paper, the campfire is a disk of gas and dust around a young star, and the flickering brightness is caused by hidden rocks warping the inner disk.
This matters because planet formation models assume disks vanish within 10 million years. Finding disks that survive 100 million years, with flickering brightness, means planets may have more time to form, and the flickers could reveal unseen planetesimals stirring the disk.
The study relies on NEOWISE data, which has limited temporal sampling and may miss short-term variability. The cause of variability is inferred (extinction or warping), not directly observed. The sample is modest (120 candidates, 13 Peter Pan disks), and the 23 new disk candidates require spectroscopic confirmation to verify gas content. The analysis does not cover all possible disk processes, such as accretion variability.
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Investigating Variability in Long-lived Protoplanetary Disks (>10 Myr) using NEOWISE — Gregory Mathews Ben, Jessy Jose, Jesús Hernández
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.