V488 Per Revisited: No Strong Mid-infrared Emission Features and No Evidence for Stellar/substellar Companions

Creators: Sankar, Swetha; Melis, Carl; Klein, Beth L.; Fulton, B. J.; Zuckerman, B.; Song, Inseok; Howard, Andrew W.

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Abstract

We present characterization of the planetary system architecture for V488 Per, the dustiest main sequence star known with a fractional infrared luminosity of ~16%. Far-infrared imaging photometry confirms the existence of an outer planetary system dust population with blackbody-fit temperature of ~130 K. Mid-infrared spectroscopy probing the previously-identified ~800 K inner planetary system dust population does not detect any obvious solid-state emission features, suggesting either large grain sizes that mute such emission and/or grain compositions dominated by species like amorphous carbon and metallic iron which do not produce such features. In the latter case, the presence of significant quantities of iron-rich material could be indicative of the active formation of a Mercury-like planet around V488 Per. In any event, the absence of solid-state emission features is very unusual among main sequence stars with copious amounts of warm orbiting dust particles; we know of no other such star whose mid-infrared spectrum lacks such features. Combined radial velocity monitoring and adaptive optics imaging find no evidence for stellar/sub-stellar companions within several hundred AU of V488 Per.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 May 17; revised 2021 July 28; accepted 2021 July 29; published 2021 November 23. C.M. acknowledges support from NASA ADAP grant No. 18-ADAP18-0233. B.K. acknowledges support from the APS M. Hildred Blewett Fellowship. A.W.H. acknowledges NSF grant No. AST-1517655. We thank the anonymous referee for useful comments that helped improve this paper. The authors wish to thank Bradford Holden for assistance in scheduling the APF observations presented in this paper. We thank George Rieke for useful discussion. Research at the Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W.M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Similarly, we acknowledge that the Lick Observatory resides on land traditionally inhabited by the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of Native Americans. This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from MAST. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA's Science Mission directorate. This work is based in part on observations made with Herschel, an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA. Support for Herschel work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System, the SIMBAD database, and the VizieR service. Facilities: Subaru(COMICS) - Subaru Telescope, APF(Levy) - , Shane(Hamilton) - , Keck(NIRC2) - , Herschel(PACS) - , TESS. -

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