Spitzer/IRAC-MIPS survey of NGC 2451A and B: Debris disks at 50-80 million years

We present a Spitzer IRAC and MIPS survey of NGC 2451A and B, two open clusters in the 50-80 Myr age range. We complement these data with extensive ground-based photometry and spectroscopy to identify the cluster members in the Spitzer survey field. We find only two members with 8 μm excesses. The incidence of excesses at 24μm is much higher, i.e., 11 of 31 solar-like stars and 1 of 7 early-type (A) stars. This work nearly completes the debris disk surveys with Spitzer of clusters in the 30-130 Myr range. This range is of interest because it is when large planetesimal collisions may have still been relatively common (as indicated by the one that led to the formation of the Moon during this period of the evolution of the solar system). We review the full set of surveys and find that there are only three possible cases out of about 250 roughly solar-mass stars where very large excesses suggest that such collisions have occurred recently.