CONFIRMING THE PRIMARILY SMOOTH STRUCTURE OF THE VEGA DEBRIS DISK AT MILLIMETER WAVELENGTHS
- Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475 (United States)
- California Institute of Technology, Department of Astronomy, MC 105-24, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
- Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 640 North Aohoku Place, Hilo, HI 96720 (United States)
- Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
- Joint ALMA Observatory, Av. El Golf 40, Piso 18, Santiago (Chile)
- Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, 933 North Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 209 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (United States)
Clumpy structure in the debris disk around Vega has been previously reported at millimeter wavelengths and attributed to concentrations of dust grains trapped in resonances with an unseen planet. However, recent imaging at similar wavelengths with higher sensitivity has disputed the observed structure. We present three new millimeter-wavelength observations that help to resolve the puzzling and contradictory observations. We have observed the Vega system with the Submillimeter Array (SMA) at a wavelength of 880 {mu}m and an angular resolution of 5''; with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) at a wavelength of 1.3 mm and an angular resolution of 5''; and with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at a wavelength of 3.3 mm and angular resolution of 10''. Despite high sensitivity and short baselines, we do not detect the Vega debris disk in either of the interferometric data sets (SMA and CARMA), which should be sensitive at high significance to clumpy structure based on previously reported observations. We obtain a marginal (3{sigma}) detection of disk emission in the GBT data; the spatial distribution of the emission is not well constrained. We analyze the observations in the context of several different models, demonstrating that the observations are consistent with a smooth, broad, axisymmetric disk with inner radius 20-100 AU and width {approx}> 50 AU. The interferometric data require that at least half of the 860 {mu}m emission detected by previous single-dish observations with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope be distributed axisymmetrically, ruling out strong contributions from flux concentrations on spatial scales of {approx}<100 AU. These observations support recent results from the Plateau de Bure Interferometer indicating that previous detections of clumpy structure in the Vega debris disk were spurious.
- OSTI ID:
- 22034564
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 750, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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