English

Evidence for a sub-jovian planet in the young TWA7 disk

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-02-24 v1

Abstract

Planets are thought to form from dust and gas in protoplanetary disks, and debris disks are the remnants of planet formation. Aged a few Myr up to a few Gyr, debris disks have lost their primordial gas, and their dust is produced by steady-state collisions between larger, rocky bodies. Tens of debris disks, with sizes of tens, sometimes hundreds of au, have been resolved with high spatial resolution, high contrast imagers at optical/near-IR or (sub)-millimeter interferometers. They commonly show cavities, ring-like structures, and gaps, which are often regarded as indirect signatures of the presence of planets that gravitationally interact with unseen planetesimals. However, no planet responsible for these features has been detected yet, probably because of the limited sensitivity (typically 2-10 MJ) of high contrast imaging instruments prior to JWST. We have used the unprecedented sensitivity of JWST/MIRI in the thermal IR to search for such planets in the disk of the ~ 6.4 Myr old star TWA 7. With its pole-on orientation, this three-ring debris disk is indeed ideally suited for such a detection. We unambiguously detected a source 1.5 arsec from the star, that is best interpreted as a cold, sub-Jupiter mass planet. Its estimated mass (~ 0.3 MJ) and position (~ 52 au, de-projected) can thoroughly account for the main disk structures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.15081,
  title  = {Evidence for a sub-jovian planet in the young TWA7 disk},
  author = {A. -M. Lagrange and C. Wilkinson and M. Mâlin and A. Boccaletti and C. Perrot and L. Matrà and F. Combes and D. Rouan and H. Beust and A. Chomez and B. Charnay and S. Mazevet and O. Flasseur and J. Olofsson and A. Bayo and Q. Kral and G. Chauvin and P. Thebault and P. Rubini and J. Milli and F. Kiefer and A. Carter and K. Crotts and A. Radcliffe and J. Mazoyer and T. Bodrito and S. Stasevic and P. Delorme and M. Langlois},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15081},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

25 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Nature