Debris Disks Around Nearby Stars with Circumstellar Gas

Abstract

We conducted a survey for infrared excess emission from 16 nearby main sequence shell stars using the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Shell stars are early-type stars with narrow absorption lines in their spectra that appear to arise from circumstellar (CS) gas. Four of the 16 stars in our survey showed excess emission at 24 microns and 70 microns characteristic of cool CS dust and are likely to be edge-on debris disks. Including previously known disks, it appears that the fraction of protoplanetary and debris disks among the main sequence shell stars is at least 48% +/- 14%. While dust in debris disks has been extensively studied, relatively little is known about their gas content. In the case of Beta Pictoris, extensive observations of gaseous species have provided insights into the dynamics of the CS material and surprises about the composition of the CS gas coming from young planetesimals (e.g. Roberge et al. 2006). To understand the co-evolution of gas and dust through the terrestrial planet formation phase, we need to study the gas in additional debris disks. The new debris disk candidates from this Spitzer survey double the number of systems in which the gas can be observed right now with sensitive line of sight absorption spectroscopy.

10 pages including 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (8)

• Debris Disk Evolution Around A Stars
• Accretion Rates in Herbig Ae stars
• Nearby debris disk systems with high fractional luminosity reconsidered
• HST/ACS Multiband Coronagraphic Imaging of the Debris Disk around Beta Pictoris
• The Carbon-Rich Gas in the Beta Pictoris Circumstellar Disk
• The Dust and Gas Around beta Pictoris
• Gas Absorption Detected from the Edge-on Debris Disk Surrounding HD32297
• Spitzer Limits On Dust Emission and Optical Gas Absorption Variability Around Nearby Stars with Edge-On Circumstellar Disk Signatures

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• A Sensitive Identification of Warm Debris Disks in the Solar Neighborhood Through Precise Calibration of Saturated WISE Photometry
• The Structure of the Local Interstellar Medium. VI. New MgII, FeII, and MnII Observations Toward Stars Within 100 Parsecs
• The hybrid disks: a search and study to better understand evolution of disks
• Exocomets: A spectroscopic survey
• Exocomets from a Solar System Perspective
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• The co-existence of hot and cold gas in debris discs
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• Gas emission from debris disks around A and F stars
• The far-infrared behaviour of Herbig Ae/Be discs: Herschel PACS photometry
• VLT imaging of the β Pictoris gas disk
• HR 10: A main-sequence binary with circumstellar envelopes around both components. Discovery and analysis
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• Detection of H${}_2$ in the TWA 7 System: A Probable Circumstellar Origin
• Diversity of Exoplanets
• Disentangling Planets from Photoelectric Instability in Gas-Rich Optically Thin Dusty Disks
• The search for gas in debris discs: ALMA detection of CO gas in HD 36546