Spitzer/MIPS Limits on Asteroidal Dust in the Pulsar Planetary System PSR B1257+1

Abstract

With the MIPS camera on Spitzer, we have searched for far-infrared emission from dust in the planetary system orbiting pulsar PSR 1257+12. With accuracies of 0.05 mJy at 24 um and 1.5 mJy at 70 um, photometric measurements find no evidence for emission at these wavelengths. These observations place new upper limits on the luminosity of dust with temperatures between 20 and 1000 K. They are particularly sensitive to dust temperatures of 100-200 K, for which they limit the dust luminosity to below $3\times 10^{-5}$ of the pulsar's spin-down luminosity, three orders of magnitude better than previous limits. Despite these improved constraints on dust emission, an asteroid belt similar to the Solar System's cannot be ruled out.

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Rocking the Lighthouse: Circumpulsar Asteroids and Radio Intermittency
• An Asteroid Belt Interpretation for the Timing Variations of the Millisecond Pulsar B1937+21
• A Comprehensive Census of Nearby Infrared Excess Stars
• The Decay of Debris Disks around Solar-Type Stars
• Ejecta, Dust, and Synchrotron Radiation in B0540-69.3: A More Crab-Like Remnant than the Crab
• Long-lived planetesimal discs
• Spitzer-MIPS Observations of the eta Cha Young Association
• X-ray emission from the planet pulsar B1257+12
• The Vela and Geminga pulsars in the mid-infrared
• Phenomenological constraints on accretion of non-annihilating dark matter on the PSR B1257+12 pulsar from orbital dynamics of its planets
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• Interaction and ablation of fall-back disks in isolated neutron stars
• Searching for Debris Disks around Seven Radio Pulsars
• Pulsar Timing Signatures of Circumbinary Asteroid Belts
• Searching for Debris Disks around Isolated Pulsars
• Submillimetre observations of RX J1856.5--3754
• Toward an understanding of the periastron puzzle of PSR B1259-63