English

Follow-Up Exploration of the TWA 7 Planet-Disk System with JWST NIRCam

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-06-26 v1

Abstract

The young M-star TWA 7 hosts a bright and near face-on debris disk, which has been imaged from the optical to the submillimeter. The disk displays multiple complex substructures such as three disk components, a large dust clump, and spiral arms, suggesting the presence of planets to actively sculpt these features. The evidence for planets in this disk was further strengthened with the recent detection of a point-source compatible with a Saturn-mass planet companion using JWST/MIRI at 11 μ\mum, at the location a planet was predicted to reside based on the disk morphology. In this paper, we present new observations of the TWA 7 system with JWST/NIRCam in the F200W and F444W filters. The disk is detected at both wavelengths and presents many of the same substructures as previously imaged, although we do not robustly detect the southern spiral arm. Furthermore, we detect two faint potential companions in the F444W filter at the 2-3σ\sigma level. While one of these companions needs further followup to determine its nature, the other one coincides with the location of the planet candidate imaged with MIRI, providing further evidence that this source is a sub-Jupiter mass planet companion rather than a background galaxy. Such discoveries make TWA 7 only the second system, after β\beta Pictoris, in which a planet predicted by the debris disk morphology has been detected.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.19932,
  title  = {Follow-Up Exploration of the TWA 7 Planet-Disk System with JWST NIRCam},
  author = {Katie A. Crotts and Aarynn L. Carter and Kellen Lawson and James Mang and Beth Biller and Mark Booth and Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez and Julien H. Girard and Anne-Marie Lagrange and Michael C. Liu and Sebastian Marino and Maxwell A. Millar-Blanchaer and Andy Skemer and Giovanni M. Strampelli and Jason Wang and Olivier Absil and William O. Balmer and Raphaël Bendahan-West and Ellis Bogat and Rachel Bowens-Rubin and Gaël Chauvin and Clémence Fontanive and Kyle Franson and Jens Kammerer and Jarron Leisenring and Caroline V. Morley and Isabel Rebollido and Nour Skaf and Ben J. Sutlieff and Evelyn L. Bruinsma and Sasha Hinkley and Kielan Hoch and Andrew D. James and Rohan Kane and Dimitri Mawet and Michael R. Meyer and Skyler Palatnick and Marshall D. Perrin and Shrishmoy Ray and Emily Rickman and Aniket Sanghi and Klaus Subbotina Stephenson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.19932},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

27 pages, 15 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in ApJL