Direct Imaging of an Asymmetric Debris Disk in the HD 106906 Planetary System
Murray-Clay, Ruth; Dong, Ruobing; Oppenheimer, Rebecca; Wolff, Schuyler G.; Arriaga, Pauline; De Rosa, Robert J.; Fitzgerald, Michael P.; Hinkley, Sasha; Macintosh, Bruce; Millar-Blanchaer, Maxwell A.; Nielsen, Eric L.; Perrin, Marshall D.; Pueyo, Laurent; Rantakyrö, Fredrik T.; Matthews, Brenda; Graham, James R.; Song, Inseok; Marchis, Franck; Schneider, Adam C.; Duchene, Gaspard; Sivaramakrishnan, Anand; Doyon, René; Greenbaum, Alexandra; Draper, Zachary H.; Kalas, Paul G.; Marois, Christian; Chilcote, Jeffrey; Ward-Duong, Kimberly; Wang, Jason J.; Long, Douglas; Morzinski, Katie M.; Ammons, S. Mark; Follette, Katherine B.; Bulger, Joanna; Cotten, Tara; Hibon, Pascale; Hung, Li-Wei; Ingraham, Patrick; Larkin, James E.; Maire, Jérôme; Patience, Jennifer; Rajan, Abhijith; Rameau, Julien; Savransky, Dmitry; Soummer, Rémi; Thomas, Sandrine; Ruffio, Jean-Baptiste; Chen, Christine; Wiktorowicz, Sloane J.; Vasisht, Gautam; Lawler, Samantha; Goodsell, Stephen; Konapacky, Quinn; Lafreniere, David; Metchev, Stan; Saddlemyer, Leslie
United States, Canada, France, Chile, United Kingdom
Abstract
We present the first scattered light detections of the HD 106906 debris disk using the Gemini/Gemini Planet Imager in the infrared and Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/Advanced Camera for Surveys in the optical. HD 106906 is a 13 Myr old F5V star in the Sco-Cen association, with a previously detected planet-mass candidate HD 106906b projected 650 AU from the host star. Our observations reveal a near edge-on debris disk that has a central cleared region with radius ∼50 AU, and an outer extent >500 AU. The HST data show that the outer regions are highly asymmetric, resembling the “needle” morphology seen for the HD 15115 debris disk. The planet candidate is oriented ∼21° away from the position angle of the primary’s debris disk, strongly suggesting non-coplanarity with the system. We hypothesize that HD 106906b could be dynamically involved in the perturbation of the primary’s disk, and investigate whether or not there is evidence for a circumplanetary dust disk or cloud that is either primordial or captured from the primary. We show that both the existing optical properties and near-infrared colors of HD 106906b are weakly consistent with this possibility, motivating future work to test for the observational signatures of dust surrounding the planet.