TY - JOUR
T1 - The Northern arc of ε Eridani's Debris Ring as seen by ALMA
AU - Booth, Mark
AU - Dent, William R.F.
AU - Jordán, Andrés
AU - Lestrade, Jean François
AU - Hales, Antonio S.
AU - Wyatt, Mark C.
AU - Casassus, Simon
AU - Ertel, Steve
AU - Greaves, Jane S.
AU - Kennedy, Grant M.
AU - Matrà, Luca
AU - Augereau, Jean Charles
AU - Villard, Eric
N1 - Funding Information:
the Royal Society as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. JCA acknowledges support from PNP/CNES. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2013.1.00645.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core PYTHON package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013).
Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank Markus Janson for providing the observational limits from Janson et al. (2015), Johan Olofsson and Claudio Caceres for help with fitting visibilities, and G. Fritz Benedict, Aaron Boley and Jacob White for useful discussions. The authors thank the referee for their helpful review. MB acknowledges support from a FONDECYT Postdoctoral Fellowship, project no. 3140479 and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through project no. Kr 2164/15-1. AJ and SC acknowledge financial support from the Millennium Nucleus RC130007 (Chilean Ministry of Economy). AJ acknowledges support from FONDECYT project no. 1130857, BASAL CATA PFB-06 and the Ministry for the Economy, Development, and Tourism’s Programa Iniciativa Científica Milenio through grant no. IC 120009, awarded to the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS). MCW acknowledges the support of the European Union through ERC grant no. 279973. GMK is supported by
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Authors.
PY - 2017/8/11
Y1 - 2017/8/11
N2 - We present the first Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the closest known extrasolar debris disc. This disc orbits the star ε Eri, a K-type star just 3.2 pc away. Due to the proximity of the star, the entire disc cannot fit within the ALMA field of view. Therefore, the observations have been centred 18" North of the star, providing us with a clear detection of the Northern arc of the ring, at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. The observed disc emission is found to be narrow with a width of just 11-13 AU. The fractional disc width we find is comparable to that of the Solar system's Kuiper Belt and makes this one of the narrowest debris discs known. If the inner and outer edges are due to resonances with a planet then this planet likely has a semi-major axis of 48 AU. We find tentative evidence for clumps in the ring, although there is a strong chance that at least one is a background galaxy. We confirm, at much higher significance, the previous detection of an unresolved emission at the star that is above the level of the photosphere and attribute this excess to stellar chromospheric emission.
AB - We present the first Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the closest known extrasolar debris disc. This disc orbits the star ε Eri, a K-type star just 3.2 pc away. Due to the proximity of the star, the entire disc cannot fit within the ALMA field of view. Therefore, the observations have been centred 18" North of the star, providing us with a clear detection of the Northern arc of the ring, at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. The observed disc emission is found to be narrow with a width of just 11-13 AU. The fractional disc width we find is comparable to that of the Solar system's Kuiper Belt and makes this one of the narrowest debris discs known. If the inner and outer edges are due to resonances with a planet then this planet likely has a semi-major axis of 48 AU. We find tentative evidence for clumps in the ring, although there is a strong chance that at least one is a background galaxy. We confirm, at much higher significance, the previous detection of an unresolved emission at the star that is above the level of the photosphere and attribute this excess to stellar chromospheric emission.
KW - Circumstellarmatter
KW - Planetary systems
KW - Stars: individual: ε Eri
KW - Submillimetre: planetary systems
KW - Submillimetre: stars
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85039454497&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stx1072
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stx1072
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85039454497
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 469
SP - 3200
EP - 3212
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 3
ER -