94 Ceti: a triple star with a planet and dust disc
Journal article, 2016

94 Ceti is a triple star system with a circumprimary gas giant planet and far-infrared excess. Such excesses around main sequence stars are likely due to debris discs, and are considered as signposts of planetary systems and, therefore, provide important insights into the configuration and evolution of the planetary system. Consequently, to learn more about the 94 Ceti system, we aim to model the dust emission precisely to fit its observed spectral energy distribution and to simulate its orbital dynamics. We interpret our APEX bolometric observations and complement them with archived Spitzer and Herschel bolometric data to explore the stellar excess and to map out background sources in the fields. Dynamical simulations and 3D radiative transfer calculations were used to constrain the debris disc configurations and model the dust emission. The best-fitting dust disc model for 94 Ceti implies a circumbinary disc around the secondary pair, limited by dynamics to radii smaller than 40 au and with a grain-size power-law distribution of ~a^-3.5 . This model exhibits a dust-to-star luminosity ratio of 4.6+/-0.4*10^-6. The system is dynamically stable and N-body symplectic simulation results are consistent with semi-analytical equations that describe orbits in binary systems. In the observations, we also find tentative evidence of a circumtertiary ring that could be edge-on.

binaries: general

submillimetre: stars

planetary systems

stars: individual: 94 Ceti (HD 19994

infrared: stars

HIP 14954)

Author

Joachim Wiegert

Chalmers, Earth and Space Sciences, Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics

V. Faramaz

Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Fernando Cruz-Saenz de Miera

National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

0035-8711 (ISSN) 1365-2966 (eISSN)

Vol. 462 2 1735-1748

Subject Categories

Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology

Roots

Basic sciences

Infrastructure

Onsala Space Observatory

DOI

10.1093/mnras/stw1682

More information

Created

10/7/2017