Predictions for a planet just inside Fomalhaut's eccentric ring
By A. Quillen. 2006
137 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We propose that the eccentricity and sharpness of the edge of Fomalhaut’s disk are due to a planet just interior to the ring edge. The collision timescale consistent with the disk opacity is long enough that spiral density waves cannot be driven near the planet. The ring edge is likely to be located at the boundary of a chaotic zone in the corotation region of the planet. We find that this zone can open a gap in a particle disk as long as the collision timescale exceeds the removal or ejection timescale in the zone. We use the slope measured from the ring edge surface brightness profile to place an upper limit on the planet mass. The removal timescale in the chaotic zone is used to estimate a lower limit. The ring edge has eccentricity caused by secular perturbations from the planet. These arguments imply that the planet has a mass between that of Neptune and that of Saturn, a semi-major axis of approximately 119 AU and longitude of periastron and eccentricity, 0.1, the same as that of the ring edge.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0212c4482a6a304fff991f5f0ca9211e8297eb8
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- FOMALHAUT'S DEBRIS DISK AND PLANET: CONSTRAINING THE MASS OF FOMALHAUT B FROM DISK MORPHOLOGY (2008, methodology): “By contrast, the upper mass limit derived by Quillen (2006), ∼0.2MJ, follows from an analysis of the radiation-free dynamics of collisionless particles—essentially, the dynamics of parent bodies—local to the chaotic zone boundary, and from the assumption that the local velocity dispersion of such…”
- Steady State Evolution of Debris Disks around A Stars (2007, background): “The inner hole in these belts has been inferred in other studies to be caused by the presence of inner planets (e.g., Roques et al. 1994; Wyatt et al. 1999; Wilner et al. 2002; Wyatt 2003; Quillen 2006).”
- Debris disc stirring by secular perturbations from giant planets (2009, background): “Secondly, we note that, althoughef ≈ 0.1, the material in the Fomalhaut disc appears to have very low proper eccentricities (Quillen 2006; Chiang et al. 2009), as evidenced by the sharpinner edge to the disc.”
- Variations on Debris Disks: Icy Planet Formation at 30-150 AU for 1-3 M☉ Main-Sequence Stars (2008, background): “Adding binary companions and giant planets provides ways to modify the evolution of the collisional cascade and to impose structure on rings and tori (e.g., Wilner et al. 2002; Moro-Martı́n & Malhotra 2005; Quillen 2006).”