English

Resolving faint structures in the debris disk around TWA7

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2020-08-12 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

Debris disks are the intrinsic by-products of the star and planet formation processes. Most likely due to instrumental limitations and their natural faintness, little is known about debris disks around low-mass stars, especially when it comes to spatially resolved observations. We present new VLT/SPHERE IRDIS Dual-Polarization Imaging (DPI) observations in which we detect the dust ring around the M2 spectral type star TWA\,7. Combined with additional Angular Differential Imaging observations we aim at a fine characterization of the debris disk and setting constraints on the presence of low-mass planets. We model the SPHERE DPI observations and constrain the location of the small dust grains, as well as the spectral energy distribution of the debris disk, using the results inferred from the observations, and perform simple N-body simulations. We find that the dust density distribution peaks at 25 au, with a very shallow outer power-law slope, and that the disk has an inclination of 13 degrees with a position angle of 90 degrees East of North. We also report low signal-to-noise detections of an outer belt at a distance of ~52 au from the star, of a spiral arm in the Southern side of the star, and of a possible dusty clump at 3.9 au. These findings seem to persist over timescales of at least a year. Using the intensity images, we do not detect any planets in the close vicinity of the star, but the sensitivity reaches Jovian planet mass upper limits. We find that the SED is best reproduced with an inner disk at 7 au and another belt at 25 au. We report the detections of several unexpected features in the disk around TWA\,7. A yet undetected 100 M_\oplus planet with a semi-major axis at 20-30 au could possibly explain the outer belt as well as the spiral arm. We conclude that stellar winds are unlikely to be responsible for the spiral arm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.01929,
  title  = {Resolving faint structures in the debris disk around TWA7},
  author = {J. Olofsson and R. G. van Holstein and A. Boccaletti and M. Janson and P. Thébault and R. Gratton and C. Lazzoni and Q. Kral and A. Bayo and H. Canovas and C. Caceres and C. Ginski and C. Pinte and R. Asensio-Torres and G. Chauvin and S. Desidera and Th. Henning and M. Langlois and J. Milli and J. E. Schlieder and M. R. Schreiber and J. -C. Augereau and M. Bonnefoy and E. Buenzli and W. Brandner and S. Durkan and N. Engler and M. Feldt and N. Godoy and C. Grady and J. Hagelberg and A. -M. Lagrange and J. Lannier and R. Ligi and A. -L. Maire and D. Mawet and F. Ménard and D. Mesa and D. Mouillet and S. Peretti and C. Perrot and G. Salter and T. Schmidt and E. Sissa and C. Thalmann and A. Vigan and L. Abe and P. Feautrier and D. Le Mignant and T. Moulin and A. Pavlov and P. Rabou and G. Rousset and A. Roux},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.01929},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted by A&A, 17 pages

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