New exocomets of $\beta$ Pic

Abstract

Aims. The aim of our work is to analyze the light curves of $\beta$ Pic recently observed by TESS in sectors 32, 33, and 34, searching for the signatures of exocomet transits. Methods. We process the $\beta$ Pic light curves from the MAST database, applying the frequency analysis to remove harmonic signals due to the star's pulsations and use a simple 1-D model to fit the profiles of the found events. Results. We recover events previously found by other authors in sectors 5 and 6 and find five new distinct aperiodic dipping events with asymmetric shapes resembling the expected profiles due to the passage of a comet-like body across the star disk. These dips are rather shallow, with the flux drop at a level of 0.03\% and a duration of less than 1 day. No periodic transits were found in the sectors investigated. Conclusions. The depth and duration of the identified dips are similar to the recently discovered transits in the $\beta$ Pic light curves from sector 5 of the TESS observations as well as to those found in the light curves of KIC 354116 and KIC 1108472 from the Kepler database. It indicates that aperiodic shallow dips are not likely an exceptional phenomenon, at least for the $\beta$ Pic system.

8 pages, 13 Figs, 1 Table. Accepted by A&A

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Hint of an exocomet transit in the CHEOPS lightcurve of HD 172555
• Curves of growth for transiting exocomets: Application to Fe II lines in the Beta Pictoris system
• CHEOPS's hunt for exocomets: photometric observations of 5 Vul
• Sudden extreme obscuration of a Sun-like main-sequence star: evolution of the circumstellar dust around ASASSN-21qj
• Multi-wavelength aperture polarimetry of debris disc host stars
• Hunting for exocomet transits in the TESS database using the Random Forest method
• Exocomet orbital distribution around $\beta$ Pictoris
• Glancing through the debris disk: Photometric analysis of DE Boo with CHEOPS
• The $\beta$ Pictoris b Hill sphere transit campaign. Paper II: Searching for the signatures of the $\beta$ Pictoris exoplanets through time delay analysis of the $\delta$ Scuti pulsations