Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011ess.....2.0706f&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, ESS meeting #2, #7.06
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Circumstellar debris disks, consisting of freshly produced dust grains around main sequence stars, act as tracers of planet formation. The directly detected planets around A stars are all associated with circumstellar debris disks. The structure of such a disk can encode useful information about the associated planets and their orbits. The archetypal example is the belt around Fomalhaut. The offset of this belt is a result of secular perturbations by the eccentric planet. The sculpting of the inner edge of this belt has been used to constrain the planet's mass. HD 61005 is a nearby (35 pc) dusty G dwarf. Its debris disk has been imaged in scattered light by HST, revealing a near-edge-on inner disk, with a 'swept' outer disk of small grains. The initial physical interpretation of this system has focused on ISM interaction as the root cause the swept morphology. Limits on interstellar NaI absorption require the purported ISM cloud to be warm and tenuous, acting only to secularly perturb grains on bound orbits. Recent AO imaging observations show the inner disk is a ring-like structure offset from the star. We will present the results of our high-angular-resolution Keck AO imaging of this system. Our models of the scattered light show that if the inner disk is intrinsically circular, it has a radius of 70 AU and is offset by 18 AU from the star. We explore the possibility that the offset is caused by secular perturbations from an eccentric planet. We will show how a planet inclined relative to the parent body population can cause small grain orbits to have the appearance of a swept morphology. We will use these dynamical models to constrain the mass and orbit of an eccentric, inclined giant planet, providing a hypothesis testable with upcoming direct imaging surveys using next-generation instruments.
Fitzgerald Michael P.
Graham James R.
Kalas Paul
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