Collisions of Terrestrial Worlds: The Occurrence of Extreme Mid-infrared Excesses around Low-mass Field Stars

Theissen, Christopher A.; West, Andrew A.

doi:10.3847/1538-3881/aa6343

Cited by 28 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 165 publications

(233 reference statements)

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“…IR excesses are detected for 51 of the WISE sources, 31 of which have had disks reported in previous work (Walker & Wolstencroft 1988;Oudmaijer et al 1992;The et al 1994;Luhman et al 2006;Rebull et al 2011;McDonald et al 2012McDonald et al , 2017Esplin et al 2014;Cotten & Song 2016;Theissen & West 2017;Liu et al 2021). The IR excess sources are classified as 18 full, 2 transitional, 3 evolved, 3 evolved or transitional, and 25 debris or evolved transitional disks.…”

Section: Circumstellar Disksmentioning

confidence: 55%

A Census of the Taurus Star-forming Region and Neighboring Associations with Gaia*

Luhman

2023

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I have used high-precision photometry and astrometry from the third data release of Gaia to perform a survey for members of the Taurus star-forming region and young associations in its vicinity. This work has produced a new catalog of 532 adopted members of Taurus, which has only minor changes relative to the previous catalog from Esplin & Luhman. I have used the Gaia astrometry to divide the Taurus members into 13 groups that have distinct kinematics. Meanwhile, I have identified 1378 candidate members of seven associations near Taurus. All of these associations have histograms of spectral types that peak near M5 (∼0.15 M ⊙), resembling other young populations in the solar neighborhood. For the Taurus groups and neighboring associations, I have estimated ages from their sequences of low-mass stars in Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams. Most of the Taurus groups have median ages of ∼1–3 Myr, while the associations have ages ranging from 13 to 56 Myr. I have used mid-infrared photometry from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to search for excess emission from circumstellar disks among the candidate members of the associations. Disks are detected for 51 stars, 20 of which are reported for the first time in this work. Some recent studies have proposed that samples of older stars (≳10 Myr) found in the vicinity of Taurus represent a distributed population that is associated with the Taurus cloud complex. However, I find that most of those stars have kinematics that are inconsistent with any relationship with Taurus.

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Section: Circumstellar Disksmentioning

confidence: 55%

A Census of the Taurus Star-forming Region and Neighboring Associations with Gaia*

Luhman

2023

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“…The star lies roughly 0.7 mag to the right of the zero-age main sequence primarily because of its K s excess of 0.623 mag. If this star is indeed a main sequence star with a debris disk as its SED fit suggests, this system would be an example of an "extreme debris disk" (Meng et al 2015;Theissen & West 2017), i.e., a signpost of a recent giant impact. Given the lack of an additional mid-IRdriven excess, this object could also be an example of a precursor to a two component system with a hot debris disk (Akeson et al 2009), where a gap has not yet been cleared between the two components.…”

Section: Stellar Model Disk Blackbody Totalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Follow-up Imaging of Disk Candidates from the Disk Detective Citizen Science Project: New Discoveries and False Positives in WISE Circumstellar Disk Surveys

Silverberg

Kuchner

Wisniewski

et al. 2018

ApJ

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The Disk Detective citizen science project aims to find new stars with excess 22-µm emission from circumstellar dust in the AllWISE data release from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We evaluated 261 Disk Detective objects of interest with imaging with the Robo-AO adaptive optics instrument on the 1.5m telescope at Palomar Observatory and with RetroCam on the 2.5m du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory to search for background objects at 0.15 − 12 separations from each target. Our analysis of these data lead us to reject 7% of targets. Combining this result with statistics from our online image classification efforts implies that at most 7.9% ± 0.2% of AllWISE-selected infrared excesses are good disk candidates. Applying our false positive rates to other surveys, we find that the infrared excess searches of McDonald et al. (2012), McDonald et al. (2017), andMarton et al. (2016) all have false positive rates > 70%. Moreover, we find that all thirteen disk candidates in Theissen & West (2014) with W4 signal-to-noise > 3 are false positives. We present 244 disk candidates that have survived vetting by follow-up imaging. Of these, 213 are newly-identified disk systems. Twelve of these are candidate members of comoving pairs based on Gaia astrometry, supporting the hypothesis that warm dust is associated with binary systems. We also note the discovery of 22 µm excess around two known members of the Scorpius-Centaurus association, and identify known disk host WISEA J164540.79-310226.6 as a likely Sco-Cen member. Thirty-one of these disk candidates are closer than ∼ 125 pc (including 27 debris disks), making them good targets for direct imaging exoplanet searches.

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“…Dust is also occasionally detected around older stars, sometimes in remarkably high quantities. Theissen & West (2017) identified extreme mid-IR excesses (L IR /L å >0.01) around a number of M-dwarfs, with ages >1 Gyr. Typical dust dispersal timescales are tens to hundreds of megayears, suggesting that this excess is not the remnants of primordial dust but instead likely the result of dramatic collisions later in the lifetime of the planetary system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Three New Late-type Stellar Companions to Very Dusty WISE Debris Disks Identified with SPHERE Imaging

Matthews

Hinkley

Stapelfeldt

et al. 2021

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Debris disk stars are good targets for high-contrast imaging searches for planetary systems, since debris disks have been shown to have a tentative correlation with giant planets. We selected 20 stars identified as debris disk hosts by the WISEmission, with particularly high levels of warm dust. We observed these with the VLT/SPHEREhighcontrast imaging instrument with the goal of finding planets and imaging the disks in scattered light. Our survey reaches a median 5σsensitivity of 10.4 M J at 25 au and 5.9 M J at 100 au. We identified three new stellar companions (HD 18378B, HD 19257B, and HD 133778B): two are mid-M-type stars and one is a late-K or early-M star. Three additional stars have very widely separated stellar companions (all at >2000 au) identified in the Gaia catalog. The stars hosting the three SPHERE-identified companions are all older (700 Myr), with one having recently left the main sequence and one a giant star. We infer that the high volumes of dust observed around these stars has been caused by a recent collision between the planets and planetesimal belts in the system, although for the most evolved star, mass loss could also be responsible for the infrared excess. Future mid-infrared spectroscopy or polarimetric imaging may allow the positions and spatial extent of these dust belts to be constrained, thereby providing evidence as to the true cause of the elevated levels of dust around these old systems. None of the disks in this survey is resolved in scattered light. Unified Astronomy Thesaurus concepts: Exoplanets (498); Extrasolar gas giants (509); Debris disks (363); Circumstellar disks (235); Planetesimals (1259); Direct imaging (387); Coronagraphic imaging (313) Supporting material: data behind figure, machine-readable table

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Collisions of Terrestrial Worlds: The Occurrence of Extreme Mid-infrared Excesses around Low-mass Field Stars

Cited by 28 publications

References 165 publications

A Census of the Taurus Star-forming Region and Neighboring Associations with Gaia*

A Census of the Taurus Star-forming Region and Neighboring Associations with Gaia*

Follow-up Imaging of Disk Candidates from the Disk Detective Citizen Science Project: New Discoveries and False Positives in WISE Circumstellar Disk Surveys

Three New Late-type Stellar Companions to Very Dusty WISE Debris Disks Identified with SPHERE Imaging

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