Circumstellar material in the Vega inner system revealed by CHARA/FLUOR

By O. Absil, E. D. Folco, A. Mérand, Jean Augereau, V. C. Foresto, J. Aufdenberg, Pierre Kervella, S. Ridgway, D. Berger, T. T. ten Brummelaar and 4 more. 2006

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. Only a handful of debris disks have been imaged up to now. Due to the need for high dynamic range and high angular resolution, very little is known about the inner planetary region, where small amounts of warm dust are expected to be found. Aims. We investigate the close neighbourhood of Vega with the help of infrared stellar interferometry and estimate the integrated K-band flux originating from the central 8 AU of the debris disk. Methods. We performed precise visibility measurements at both short (∼30 m) and long (∼150 m) baselines with the FLUOR beamcombiner installed at the CHARA Array (Mt Wilson, California) in order to separately resolve the emissions from the extended debris disk (short baselines) and from the stellar photosphere (long baselines). Results. After revising Vega’s K-band angular diameter (θUD = 3.202 ± 0.005 mas), we show that a significant deficit in squared visibility (∆V 2 = 1.88 ± 0.34%) is detected at short baselines with respect to the best-fit uniform disk stellar model. This deficit can be either attributed to the presence of a low-mass stellar companion around Vega, or as the signature of the thermal and scattered emissions from the debris disk. We show that the presence of a close companion is highly unlikely, as well as other possible perturbations (stellar morphology, calibration), and deduce that we have most probably detected the presence of dust in the close neighbourhood of Vega. The resulting flux ratio between the stellar photosphere and the debris disk amounts to 1.29 ± 0.19% within the FLUOR field-of-view (∼7.8 AU). Finally, we complement our K-band study with archival photometric and interferometric data in order to evaluate the main physical properties of the inner dust disk. The inferred properties suggest that the Vega system could be currently undergoing major dynamical perturbations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70bbdefeb53a63845367e9dc4ff223ec82ed5e11

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Kenyon
2. B. Bromley
3. M. C. Wyatt
4. S. Raymond
5. Philip Armitage
6. A. Mandell
7. F. Selsis
8. A. Moro-Martin

Citations in the corpus

• Fundamental Parameters of 87 Stars from the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (2017, unknown): “…(2016) 2.12±0.02 Ligi et al. (2012) 2.041±0.043 Baines et al. (2010) 172167 3.280±0.016 2.930±0.007 Monnier et al. (2012) 3.08±0.03a Mourard et al. (2009) 3.202±0.005a Absil et al. (2006) 3.329±0.006 Aufdenberg et al. (2006) 3.225±0.032 Mozurkewich et al. (2003) 3.28±0.01 Ciardi et al. (2001)…”
• Debris disks as signposts of terrestrial planet formation (2011, background): “The reader is referred to other work discussing current dust detection limits at short (Absil et al. 2006; Akeson et al. 2009) and long (Smith et al. 2009) wavelengths (see also Wyatt 2008).”
• First Results from the CHARA Array. VII. Long-Baseline Interferometric Measurements of Vega Consistent with a Pole-On, Rapidly Rotating Star (2006, methodology): “Absil et al. (2006) report that a small fraction, f =1.29±0.16%, of Vega’s K’ band flux comes from an extended structure, most likely Vega’s debris disk.”
• Steady State Evolution of Debris Disks around A Stars (2007, background): “Indeed it has recently been shown that Vega (HD172167) does have an additional dust component at a few AU (Absil et al. 2006), as was already inferred for HR4796 (HD109573; Augereau et al. 1999).”
• Variations on Debris Disks: Icy Planet Formation at 30-150 AU for 1-3 M☉ Main-Sequence Stars (2008, background): “Some stars have excesses from grains plausibly associated with the terrestrial zone (e.g., Beichman et al. 2005; Absil et al. 2006; Currie et al. 2007b; Rhee et al. 2007b; Meyer et al. 2008; Lisse et al. 2007c).”
• PIONIER: a 4-telescope visitor instrument at VLTI (2011, background): “The very inner part of these exozodiacal disks have remained elusive until recently, when near-infrared interferometric observations revealed a resolved excess flux of about 1% around several nearby stars (Absil et al. 2006, 2008, 2009; di Folco et al. 2007; Akeson et al. 2009).”