The Apparent Absence of Forward Scattering in the HD 53143 Debris Disk
Abstract
HD 53143 is a mature Sun-like star and host to a broad disk of dusty debris, including a cold outer ring of planetesimals near 90 au. Unlike most other inclined debris disks imaged at visible wavelengths, the cold disk around HD 53143 appears as disconnected "arcs" of material, with no forward-scattering side detected to date. We present new, deeper Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph coronagraphic observations of the HD 53143 debris disk and show that the forward-scattering side of the disk remains undetected. By fitting our KLIP-reduced observations via forward modeling with an optically thin disk model, we show that fitting the visible wavelength images with an azimuthally symmetric disk with unconstrained orientation results in an unphysical edge-on orientation that is at odds with recent ALMA observations, while constraining the orientation to that observed by ALMA results in nearly isotropically scattering dust. We show that the HD 53143 host star exhibits significant stellar variations due to spot rotation and revisit age estimates for this system.
Additional Information
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. The authors acknowledge Pierre Kervella for assistance in assessing the binarity of HD 53143. This research is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 526555. These observations are associated with program 16202. Part of the computations presented here were conducted in the Resnick High Performance Computing Center, a facility supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.Attached Files
Published - Stark_2023_ApJ_945_131.pdf
Files
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:8badf74b34980bc94475bd52b50d6ce6
|
2.0 MB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 120683
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20230404-289763500.5
- NAS 5-26555
- NASA
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- Gaia Multilateral Agreement
- Created
-
2023-05-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-05-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Resnick Sustainability Institute