Utilizing the Atacama Massive Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a global workforce of astronomers has carried out high-resolution observations of an M-dwarf star often known as 2MASS J04124068+2438157. Outcomes of the observational marketing campaign, revealed March 25 on the arXiv pre-print repository, point out that the star hosts a big double-ring dust disk.
At a distance of some 485 light years away from the Earth, 2MASS J04124068+2438157 (or 2M041240 for brief) is an M dwarf of spectral sort M3.5, estimated to be 4.7 million years outdated. The star has a radius of 1.2 solar radii, mass of about 0.42 solar masses, and its efficient temperature is roughly 3,300 Okay.
Earlier observations have discovered that 2M041240 hosts a really prolonged dust disk. Subsequently, a bunch of astronomers led by Feng Lengthy of the College of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, determined to look at this star with ALMA, hoping to get extra insights into the properties of the disk surrounding it.
“This paper introduced new ALMA Band 6 observations of the disk round a low mass star 2MASS J04124068+2438157. We utilized parametric Gaussian fashions to characterize the dust emission morphology within the visibility airplane and carried out Keck AO [adaptive optics] observations to discover the reason for the noticed disk substructures,” the researchers wrote.
ALMA observations discovered that the dust disk round 2M041240 consists solely of two slim rings at distances of 70 and 116 AU. Each rings look like fairly slim, with gaussian widths of 5.6 and eight.5 AU, respectively. The outer ring turned out to be narrower than the native strain scale peak, which counsel the presence of strain bump that traps dust particles.
The scale of the entire disk was estimated to be round 126 AU, which is far bigger than disks with related millimeter luminosity. In keeping with the astronomers, this implies that the disk of 2M041240 doubtless fashioned giant and constructed the strain bump at early occasions that sustained millimeter-sized grains at giant radii.
The authors of the paper assume that planet–disk interactions are the most definitely clarification for the noticed gaps and rings within the disk of 2M041240. They added that the properties of the hole between the 2 rings, might point out the presence of a Saturn-mass planet at about 90 AU from the star.
“Analyses of the hole/ring properties counsel a Saturn mass planet at ∼90 AU is probably going answerable for the formation of the outer ring,” the researchers concluded.
Nevertheless, additional observations are required with a view to verify this assumption. The authors of the examine suggest utilizing NASA’s James Webb Area Telescope (JWST) with a view to confirm whether or not or not the expected Saturn-mass planet is orbiting 2M041240 in its outer disk.
Extra data:
Feng Lengthy et al, A Massive Double-ring Disk across the Taurus M Dwarf J04124068+2438157, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2303.14586
Journal data:
arXiv
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Massive double-ring disk detected across the star 2MASS J04124068+2438157 (2023, April 4)
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