1306.0581 (Markus Janson et al.)

The SEEDS Direct Imaging Survey for Planets and Scattered Dust Emission in Debris Disk Systems    [PDF]

Markus Janson, Timothy D. Brandt, Amaya Moro-Martin, Tomonori Usuda, Christian Thalmann, Joseph C. Carson, Miwa Goto, Thayne Currie, M. W. McElwain, Yoichi Itoh, Misato Fukagawa, Justin Crepp, Masayuki Kuzuhara, Jun Hashimoto, Tomoyuki Kudo, Nobuhiko Kusakabe, Lyu Abe, Wolfgang Brandner, Sebastian Egner, Markus Feldt, Carol A. Grady, Olivier Guyon, Yutaka Hayano, Masahiro Hayashi, Saeko Hayashi, Thomas Henning, Klaus W. Hodapp, Miki Ishii, Masanori Iye, Ryo Kandori, Gillian R. Knapp, Jungmi Kwon, Taro Matsuo, Shoken Miyama, Jun-Ichi Morino, Tetsuro Nishimura, Tae-Soo Pyo, Eugene Serabyn, Takuya Suenaga, Hiroshi Suto, Ryuji Suzuki, Yasuhiro Takahashi, Michihiro Takami, Naruhisa Takato, Hiroshi Terada, Daego Tomono, Edwin L. Turner, Makoto Watanabe, John Wisniewski, Toru Yamada, Hideki Takami, Motohide Tamura

Debris disks around young main-sequence stars often have gaps and cavities which for a long time have been interpreted as possibly being caused by planets. In recent years, several giant planet discoveries have been made in systems hosting disks of precisely this nature, further implying that interactions with planets could be a common cause of such disk structures. As part of the SEEDS high-contrast imaging survey, we are surveying a population of debris disk-hosting stars with gaps and cavities implied by their spectral energy distributions, in order to attempt to spatially resolve the disk as well as to detect any planets that may be responsible for the disk structure. Here we report on intermediate results from this survey. Five debris disks have been spatially resolved, and a number of faint point sources have been discovered, most of which have been tested for common proper motion, which in each case has excluded physical companionship with the target stars. From the detection limits of the 50 targets that have been observed, we find that beta Pic b-like planets (~10 Mjup planets around G--A-type stars) near the gap edges are less frequent than 15--30%, implying that if giant planets are the dominant cause of these wide (27 AU on average) gaps, they are generally less massive than beta Pic b.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0581