A Trend in Stellar Luminosity-Disc Radius
Plot of stellar luminosity vs. disc radius for a sample of 97 spatially resolved debris discs, taken from Marshall et al. (2021a). The vertical error bars denote the width of the debris disc. Light grey lines denote samples randomly drawn from the posterior probability distribution of a power law fit to the distribution. An increasing trend between disc radius and stellar luminosity is observed, suggesting that larger discs are (generally) found around more luminous stars. The slope of this trend is what would be expected if the CO ice line in primordial protoplanetary discs were responsible for setting the location for planetesimal formation around the host stars.