Dust in the 55 Cancri planetary system
Ray Jayawardhana, Wayne S. Holland, Jane S. Greaves, William R. F. Dent, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Lee W. Hartmann, Giovanni G. Fazio
Abstract
The presence of debris disks around 1-Gyr-old main sequence stars suggests that an appreciable amount of dust may persist even in mature planetary systems. Here we report the detection of dust emission from 55 Cancri, a star with one, or possibly two, planetary companions detected through radial velocity measurements. Our observations at 850μm and 450μm imply a dust mass of 0.0008-0.005 Earth masses, somewhat higher than that in the the Kuiper Belt of our solar system. The estimated temperature of the dust grains and a simple model fit both indicate a central disk hole of at least 10 AU in radius. Thus, the region where the planets are detected is likely to be significantly depleted of dust. Our results suggest that far-infrared and sub-millimeter observations are powerful tools for probing the outer regions of extrasolar planetary systems.
Create a lesson
Related papers
On binary pulsars and the force of gravity
Davor Palle
Tidal torques. A critical review of some techniques
Michael Efroimsky, James G. Williams
Dynamics of a Spherical Accretion Shock with Neutrino Heating and Alpha-Particle Recombination
Rodrigo Fernández, Christopher Thompson
Asymptotically FRW black holes
J. T. Firouzjaee, Reza Mansouri
Reaction of Accretion Disks to Abrupt Mass Loss During Binary Black Hole Merger
Sean M. O'Neill, M. Coleman Miller, Tamara Bogdanovic et al.
A Gamma-Ray Burst/Pulsar for Cosmic-Ray Positrons with a Dark Matter-like Spectrum
Kunihito Ioka