Deep imaging of β Pictoris at L': asymmetries in the disc and constraints on planets

Abstract

We demonstrate here the potential of VLT/NaCo at L' (3.8μm) in Angular Differential Imaging (ADI). We detect the β Pictoris disc above 5σ between 0.4'' and 3.8'', after combining data from 7 epochs or 3.1 years. To avoid the smearing of the planet due to its orbital motion within this time span (green arrow), we subtracted the planet from the 7 datasets. We used a star subtraction technique based on PCA (Soummer et al. 2012) and corrected for ADI biases by iterating. We implemented a forward modeling approach to constrain the dust distribution.

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