Resolved Millimeter Emission from the HD 15115 Debris Disk

Abstract

We have used the Submillimeter Array (SMA) to make 1.3 millimeter observations of the debris disk surrounding HD 15115, an F-type star with a putative membership in the beta Pictoris moving group. This nearly edge-on debris disk shows an extreme asymmetry in optical scattered light, with an extent almost two times larger to the west of the star than to the east (originally dubbed the "Blue Needle"). The SMA observations reveal resolved emission that we model as a circumstellar belt of thermal dust emission. This belt extends to a radius of ~110 AU, coincident with the break in the scattered light profile convincingly seen on the western side of the disk. This outer edge location is consistent with the presence of an underlying population of dust-producing planetesimals undergoing a collisional cascade, as hypothesized in "birth ring" theory. In addition, the millimeter emission shows a ~3 sigma feature aligned with the asymmetric western extension of the scattered light disk. If this millimeter extension is real, then mechanisms for asymmetry that affect only small grains, such as interactions with interstellar gas, are disfavored. This tentative feature might be explained by secular perturbations to grain orbits introduced by neutral gas drag, as previously invoked to explain asymmetric morphologies of other, similar debris disks.

19 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (8)

• Molecular Gas Clumps from the Destruction of Icy Bodies in the $\beta$ Pictoris Debris Disk
• Nearby debris disk systems with high fractional luminosity reconsidered
• Debris from giant impacts between planetary embryos at large orbital radii
• Discovery of extreme asymmetry in the debris disk surrounding HD 15115
• The Dust Properties of Eight Debris Disk Candidates as Determined by Submillimeter Photometry
• Color Gradients Detected in the HD 15115 Circumstellar Disk
• CARMA Millimeter-Wave Aperture Synthesis Imaging of the HD 32297 Debris Disk
• On the nature of clumps in debris disks

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• Multiple Rings of Millimeter Dust Emission in the HD 15115 Debris Disk
• A $75\%$ Occurrence Rate of Debris Discs around F stars in the $\beta$ Pic Moving Group
• HD 106906: A Case Study for External Perturbations of a Debris Disk
• Investigating the presence of two belts in the HD 15115 system
• Dust Populations in the Iconic Vega Planetary System Resolved by ALMA
• What Sets the Radial Locations of Warm Debris Disks?
• Four new PLanetesimals Around TYpical and Pre-main seqUence Stars (PLATYPUS) Debris Discs at 8.8mm
• A kinematically unbiased, all-sky search for nearby, young, low-mass stars