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Dust in the 55 Cancri Planetary System

Ray Jayawardhana^1,2,3, Wayne S. Holland^2,4, Jane S. Greaves⁴, William R. F. Dent⁵, Geoffrey W. Marcy⁶, Lee W. Hartmann¹, and Giovanni G. Fazio¹

© 2000. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 536, Number 1 Citation Ray Jayawardhana et al 2000 ApJ 536 425 DOI 10.1086/308942

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Author affiliations

¹ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

² Visiting Astronomer, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which is operated by The Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and the National Research Council of Canada

³ Visiting Astronomer, W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation

⁴ Joint Astronomy Centre, 660 N. A'ohoku Place, University Park, Hilo, HI 96720

⁵ United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh EH9 3HJ, Scotland, UK

⁶ Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720

Dates

Received 2000 January 12
Accepted 2000 January 14

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Abstract

The presence of debris disks around ~1 Gyr old main-sequence stars suggests that an appreciable amount of dust may persist even in mature planetary systems. Here we report the detection of dust emission from 55 Cancri, a star with one, or possibly two, planetary companions detected through radial velocity measurements. Our observations at 850 and 450 μm imply a dust mass of 0.0008-0.005 Earth masses, somewhat higher than that in the Kuiper Belt of our solar system. The estimated temperature of the dust grains and a simple model fit both indicate a central disk hole of at least 10 AU in radius. Thus, the region in which the planets are detected is likely to be significantly depleted of dust. Our results suggest that far-infrared and submillimeter observations are powerful tools for probing the outer regions of extrasolar planetary systems.

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