Poynting-Robertson Drag on Dust

The Poynting-Robertson effect is the slow inspiral of small dust particles in orbit around a star due to the aberration of stellar radiation: a particle absorbs radiation from the forward direction and re-emits it isotropically, producing a net retarding force on the orbital motion. This mechanism, well understood in GR and classical electrodynamics, clears dust from planetary systems on timescales of thousands to millions of years and is a key process in debris disk evolution. Tension with ΛCDM-based models of interplanetary dust and debris disks arises from the observed persistence of dust in certain orbital configurations beyond the lifetime that Poynting-Robertson drag would allow, and from anomalous spatial distributions of interstellar dust grains that do not follow the expected radiative force trajectories from known sources. The Cosmic Infrared Background measurements also show contributions from very small dust grains at locations inconsistent with pure stellar radiation pressure trajectories.

Successive Collision Theory addresses Poynting-Robertson drag anomalies through the hereditary time transmission mechanism. Dust particles in the Solar System and in the interstellar medium are embedded within the full nested comoving frame hierarchy — solar potential, galactic potential, Local Group potential, and higher parent frames. The hereditary time correction modifies the effective rate at which radiative processes transfer momentum to dust particles because the photon arrival rate in the local proper frame differs fractionally from the coordinate-time rate by the product of all frame-level time-dilation factors. This introduces a systematic correction to the Poynting-Robertson drag timescale at the parts-per-billion level that is consistent with the GPS correction mechanism extended to dust dynamics — too small to affect laboratory measurements but potentially relevant for dust that has been in orbit for billions of years.

More significantly for observed dust distributions, the angular momentum inherited by the Solar System from the collision debris sets the preferred orbital planes and velocity dispersions for interplanetary dust grain populations. Dust that was incorporated into the solar nebula from the collision debris field has orbital properties aligned with the inherited angular momentum axis — the ecliptic plane — and its subsequent Poynting-Robertson evolution proceeds within this organized angular momentum framework rather than from random initial conditions. The persistence of dust in certain orbital configurations beyond naive Poynting-Robertson lifetimes can be explained by the continuous resupply from the collision-debris-organized dust reservoir maintained by the inherited angular momentum structure, which continuously channels new material into the same orbital family faster than radiation forces can remove it.