Detection Of Exocomets Within Edge-on Debris Disks

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Scientific paper

The youngest circumstellar debris disks in orbit around main sequence stars are thought to represent the last stage in the formation of a planetary system. Dust and gas continues to be replenished in these systems when planetesimals reach sizes of around 2000 km. Dynamical instabilities can "stir" the population of smaller planetesimals such that they undergo violent dust-generating collisions with each other. The same instabilities may send comets on highly eccentric orbits toward the star in these debris disk systems.
Four stars, including the protypical debris disk star Beta Pic, have already been shown to exhibit short-term (i.e., night-to-night) variability in Ca II, which is widely believed to be due to infalling evaporating bodies (FEBs or exocomets).
We have collected moderately high-resolution spectra of ten young, A-type, rapidly-rotating stars with excess infrared continuum emission using the Cassegrain-Echelle spectrograph of the 2.1m Otto Struve Telescope. Here, we report the detection of two new gas disk systems with short-term variability in CaII: 5 Vul and 49 Cet. While the circumstellar disks of both stars have been previously described in the literature, this is the first report of night-to-night variability within the debris disk gas. Velocity arguments have allowed us to place some constraints on the dynamics of the absorbing gas.

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