English

Formation of the warped debris disc around $\beta$ Pictoris

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2023-05-31 v1

Abstract

In light of the recent confirmation of an eccentric orbit giant planet, β\beta Pic c, I revisit the formation and evolution of the warped debris disc in the system. β\beta Pic c is interior to β\beta Pic b, and the debris disc is exterior to both planets. Previous NN-body simulations have shown that β\beta Pic b is responsible for exciting the inclination of the debris disc. With hydrodynamical simulations, I model a protoplanetary gas disc misaligned with the planets. I find that the gas disc does not exhibit significant long lasting inclination excitation from the planets even for the observed disc size. The warp that is excited by the planets propagates through the entire disc with a timescale much less than the gas disc lifetime. Therefore, the observed warp in the debris disc must be produced after the gas disc has dispersed. With analytical secular theory calculations, I show that two secular resonances are exterior to β\beta Pic b, located at 20au\sim 20\, \rm au and 25au\sim 25\, \rm au. This agrees with my NN-body simulations that show that these secular resonances shape the inner edge of the β\beta Pic debris disc at a radius that agrees with observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.14834,
  title  = {Formation of the warped debris disc around $\beta$ Pictoris},
  author = {Jeremy L. Smallwood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14834},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS