IRAC View of a Late Heavy Comet Bombardment in the eta Corvi System

Details IRAC View of a Late Heavy Comet Bombardment in the eta Corvi System IRAC View of a Late Heavy Comet Bombardment in the eta Corvi System

Feb 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012sptz.prop80256l&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #80256

Physics

Scientific paper

The nearby sun-like star eta Corvi (F2V, d=18 pc, age =1.2 Gyr) has long been known to possess a bright, dusty Kuiper Belt that has now been resolved with Herschel. A warm inner dust belt was indicated by an IRAS 12 micron excess and has recently been resolved as a 3-AU scale structure. In 2011 we further characterized this warm dust using Spitzer IRS, identifying the signatures of ice, organics and silicate dust in this system's Terrestrial Habitability Zone (THZ). The system appears to be undergoing a Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), delivering primitive, water- and organic-rich material from the Kuiper Belt to the THZ, at roughly the same relative age as the solar system's LHB. Our data also showed an upturn in the excess flux shortwards of 6 um - evidence for a surprisingly large amount of icy dust scattering in the inner system (Lscat/Lstar ~ 1.0%). We have tentatively verified this IRS result using 2-5 um NASA/IRTF SPeX spectroscopy, but its absolute calibration is still in question. We propose a short series of Warm Spitzer IRAC 3.6 and 4.5 um observations of the system to (1) photometrically verify the presence of this icy scattered light excess in the unresolved stellar source, (2) image the region as close as 50 AU from the star to search for any scattered light from icy dust, and (3) search for a planetary object at 100 - 1000 AU whose perturbations to the system's Kuiper Belt could be the cause of its high level of inner warm dust.

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