Dust in the 55 Cancri planetary system

Abstract

The presence of debris disks around $\sim$ 1-Gyr-old main sequence stars suggests that an appreciable amount of dust may persist even in mature planetary systems. Here we report the detection of dust emission from 55 Cancri, a star with one, or possibly two, planetary companions detected through radial velocity measurements. Our observations at 850$\mu$m and 450$\mu$m imply a dust mass of 0.0008-0.005 Earth masses, somewhat higher than that in the the Kuiper Belt of our solar system. The estimated temperature of the dust grains and a simple model fit both indicate a central disk hole of at least 10 AU in radius. Thus, the region where the planets are detected is likely to be significantly depleted of dust. Our results suggest that far-infrared and sub-millimeter observations are powerful tools for probing the outer regions of extrasolar planetary systems.

8 pages and 2 figures, to appear in the Astrophysical Journal

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Incidence and survival of remnant disks around main-sequence stars
• A Planet at 5 AU Around 55 Cancri
• Gravitational Stirring in Planetary Debris Disks
• NICMOS Coronagraphic Observations of 55 Cancri
• Effects of albedo and disc on the zero velocity curves and linear stability of equilibrium points in the generalized restricted three body problem
• New sub-millimeter limits on dust in the 55 Cancri planetary system
• Dynamical Effects from Asteroid Belts for Planetary Systems
• A search for circumstellar dust disks with ADONIS
• Effects of perturbing forces on the orbital stability of planetary systems