English

ASASSN-24fw: Candidate circumplanetary disk occultation of a main-sequence star

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-11-14 v3 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Dusty disks around planetary and substellar companions in outer reaches of exo-planetary systems can be detected as long-lasting occultations, provided the observer is close to the secondary's orbital plane. Here we report optical spectroscopy with KOSMOS (APO), MagE (Magellan) and GHOST (Gemini-S) of ASASSN-24fw (Gaia 07:05:18.97+06:12:19.4), a 4-magnitude dimming event of a main-sequence star which lasted 8.5 months. We discover multiple low-ionization metal emission lines with velocity dispersion 10\lesssim 10 km/s blue-shifted by 27 km/s with respect to the star, as well as kinematically complex Na D absorption. If associated with the occulter, these detections suggest that the occulter is gas-rich. Further, we detect blue-shifted and broad (200\sim 200 km/s) Hα\alpha line, which likely originates in the inner circumstellar disk. We confirm the previously reported occultations in 1981 and 1937 seen in historic data, yielding a semi-major axis of the occulter's orbital motion around the star of 14 AU. If the occulter is a circumsecondary disk filling 30-100% of the Hill radius, we estimate the minimum mass of the secondary to be a few Jupiter masses and a disk mass of 1% of the mass of the Moon. Given the age of the star (>2>2 Gyr), the disk is unlikely to be a survivor of the planet formation stage and may be a result of a planetary collision. If Na D absorption and/or metal emission lines originate in the disk, the observations presented here are the first discovery of a circumsecondary disk wind or rotation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.05367,
  title  = {ASASSN-24fw: Candidate circumplanetary disk occultation of a main-sequence star},
  author = {Nadia L. Zakamska and Gautham Adamane Pallathadka and Dmitry Bizyaev and Jaroslav Merc and James E. Owen and Henrique Reggiani and Kevin C. Schlaufman and Karolina Bąkowska and Sławomir Bednarz and Krzysztof Bernacki and Agnieszka Gurgul and Kirsten R. Hall and Franz-Josef Hambsch and Barbara Joachimczyk and Krzysztof Kotysz and Sebastian Kurowski and Alexios Liakos and Przemysław J. Mikołajczyk and Erika Pakštienė and Grzegorz Pojmański and Adam Popowicz and Daniel E. Reichart and Łukasz Wyrzykowski and Justas Zdanavičius and Michał Żejmo and Paweł Zieliński and Staszek Zola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05367},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

28 pages, in press in AJ