We find that the initial dust masses in planetary debris disks are correlated with the metallicities of their central stars .
We compiled a large sample of systems , including Spitzer , the Herschel DUNES and DEBRIS surveys , and WISE debris disk candidates .
We also merged 33 metallicity catalogs to provide homogeneous [ Fe/H ] and \sigma _ { [ Fe / H ] } values .
We analyzed this merged sample , including 222 detected disks ( 74 warm and 148 cold ) around a total of 187 systems ( some with multiple components ) and 440 disks with only upper limits ( 125 warm and 315 cold ) , around a total of 360 systems .
The disk dust masses at a common early evolutionary point in time were determined using our numerical disk evolutionary code , evolving a unique model for each of the 662 disks backward to an age of 1 Myr .
We find that disk-bearing stars seldom have metallicities less than { [ Fe / H ] } = -0.2 and that the distribution of warm component masses lacks examples with large mass around stars of low metallicity ( { [ Fe / H ] } < -0.085 ) .
Previous efforts to find a correlation have been largely unsuccessful ; the primary improvements supporting our result are : 1 . )
basing the study on dust masses , not just infrared excess detections ; 2 . )
including upper limits on dust mass in a quantitative way ; 3 . )
accounting for the evolution of debris disk excesses as systems age ; 4 . )
accounting fully for the range of uncertainties in metallicity measurements ; and 5 . )
having a statistically large enough sample .