English

The Planet Formation Potential Around a 45 Myr old Accreting M Dwarf

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-02-20 v1

Abstract

Debris disk detections around M dwarfs are rare, and so far no gas emission has been detected from an M dwarf debris disk. This makes the 45 Myr old M dwarf WISEJ080822.18-644357.3 a bit of a curiosity; it has a strong infrared excess at an age beyond the lifetime of a typical planet-forming disk, and also exhibits broad Hα\alpha emission consistent with active accretion from a gaseous disk. To better understand the cold gas and dust properties of this system, we obtained ALMA observations of the 1.3mm continuum and the CO/13^{13}CO/C18^{18}O J=2-1 emission lines. No cold CO gas is detected from this system, ruling out a gas-rich protoplanetary disk. Unresolved dust continuum emission is detected at a flux of 198±\pm15 μ\muJy, consistent with 0.057±\pm0.006 M_{\oplus} worth of optically thin dust, and consistent with being generated through a collisional cascade induced by large bodies at radii <<16 au. With a sufficiently strong stellar wind, dust grains released in the outer disk can migrate inwards via PR drag, potentially serving as a source of grains for the strong infrared excess.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.04124,
  title  = {The Planet Formation Potential Around a 45 Myr old Accreting M Dwarf},
  author = {Kevin M. Flaherty and A. Meredith Hughes and Eric E. Mamajek and Simon J. Murphy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.04124},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

9 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ