Dust around nearby stars (dunes): Description of the project and results.

DUNES is an Open Time Key Programme of the Herschel Space Observatory aimed at detecting and studying cold dusty -debris- discs, i.e. Kuiper-belt analogues, around FGK stars of the solar neighbourhood, in a volume-limited sample of 133 stars. The sensitivity and wavelengths of the two instruments used, namely PACS (70, 100, and 160 µm) and SPIRE (250, 350, and 500 µm) are the appropriate ones for these tasks. Debris discs are the result of collisions of planetesimals formed at early stages of the star formation episode, when the star is younger than about 30 Myr, and the discs, so-called protoplanetary, are composed of gas and dust. The whole sample is already observed and the team is currently analysing the data. We outline here some of the main results we have found.