Variable star RZ Piscium has a compact and highly perturbed debris disk, study finds

Utilizing NASA’s Spitzer and WISE space telescopes, astronomers from the Steward Observatory and elsewhere have noticed a widely known variable star designated RZ Piscium. They discovered that the star’s circumstellar particles disk is compact and extremely perturbed. The discovering is reported in a paper published October 18 on the pre-print server arXiv.

RZ Piscium (or RZ Psc for brief) is a UX Orionis sort variable star positioned some 600 light years away within the constellation of Pisces, estimated to be between 30 and 50 million years previous. The star is thought to showcase sharp irregular optical dips over the previous 5 a long time, pointing to the presence of a considerable mass of gasoline and dust orbiting it.

Earlier observations have discovered that RZ Piscium hosts a circumstellar dust disk and a red dwarf companion (with a mass of about 0.12 solar masses) at a projected separation of twenty-two AU. The disk orbits the first star however the secondary star most definitely has a big influence on the disk itself resembling truncating the disk periphery and closely stirring the remaining planetesimals.

A staff of astronomers led by Kate Su of the Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, determined to take a better have a look at the disk of RZ Piscium, hoping to shed extra mild on its nature and properties. They analyzed multi-year monitoring information from Spitzer and WISE to probe primarily the short- (weekly) and long-term (month-to-month to yearly) infrared variability of this disk.

“We current multiyear infrared monitoring information from Spitzer and WISE to trace the actions of inside particles manufacturing/destruction in RZ Psc. Millimeter observations together with the SED [spectral energy distribution] modeling present a superb evaluation of the general disk properties,” the researchers defined.

The research discovered that RZ Piscium has a near edge-on, extremely perturbed disk with an inside radius of 0.1 AU and an outer radius of 12 AU. The disk has an estimated dust mass between 0.0064 and 0.04 Earth plenty, carbon monoxide mass of lower than 0.00001 Earth plenty, what yields a really low gas-to-dust mass ratio.

Due to this fact, the findings recommend that RZ Piscium hosts a gas-poor particles disk and has advanced out of the gas-rich protoplanetary disk stage. The observations additionally revealed that the particles emission within the disk varies on a weekly scale, and the longest interval with out a big diploma change is about two weeks.

In keeping with the authors of the paper, the evaluation of the accessible information signifies that RZ Piscium has skilled intense collisional exercise, equal to total destruction of a 90-km-wide asteroid yearly. Such exercise could also be a results of planetary migration or planet-planet scattering. The astronomers added that the disk of RZ Piscium is very perturbed both by not too long ago shaped big planets and/or by its low-mass companion.

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