Search for: All records

ϵ Eridani is the closest star to our Sun known to host a debris disc. Prior observations in the (sub-)millimetre regime have potentially detected clumpy structure in the disc and attributed this to interactions with an (as yet) undetected planet. However, the prior observations were unable to distinguish between structure in the disc and background confusion. Here, we present the first ALMA image of the entire disc, which has a resolution of 1.6 × 1.2 arcsec2. We clearly detect the star, the main belt, and two-point sources. The resolution and sensitivity of this data allow us to clearly distinguish background galaxies (that show up as point sources) from the disc emission. We show that the two-point sources are consistent with background galaxies. After taking account of these, we find that resolved residuals are still present in the main belt, including two clumps with a >3σ significance – one to the east of the star and the other to the north-west. We perform N-body simulations to demonstrate that a migrating planet can form structures similar to those observed by trapping planetesimals in resonances. We find that the observed features can be reproduced by a migrating planet trapping planetesimals in the 2:1 mean motion resonance and the symmetry of the most prominent clumps means that the planet should have a position angle of either ∼10° or ∼190°. Observations over multiple epochs are necessary to test whether the observed features rotate around the star.

 

ABSTRACT We present 1.3 mm continuum ALMA long-baseline observations at 3–5 au resolution of 10 of the brightest discs from the Ophiuchus DIsc Survey Employing ALMA (ODISEA) project. We identify a total of 26 narrow rings and gaps distributed in 8 sources and 3 discs with small dust cavities (r <10 au). We find that two discs around embedded protostars lack the clear gaps and rings that are ubiquitous in more evolved sources with Class II SEDs. Our sample includes five objects with previously known large dust cavities (r >20 au). We find that the 1.3 mm radial profiles of these objects are in good agreement with those produced by numerical simulations of dust evolution and planet–disc interactions, which predict the accumulation of mm-sized grains at the edges of planet-induced cavities. Our long-baseline observations resulted in the largest sample of discs observed at ∼3–5 au resolution in any given star-forming region (15 objects when combined with Ophiuchus objects in the DSHARP Large Program) and allow for a demographic study of the brightest $\sim\! 5{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of the discs in Ophiuchus (i.e. the most likely formation sites of giant planets in the cloud). We use this unique sample to propose an evolutionary sequence and discuss a scenario in which the substructures observed in massive protoplanetary discs are mainly the result of planet formation and dust evolution. If this scenario is correct, the detailed study of disc substructures might provide a window to investigate a population of planets that remains mostly undetectable by other techniques.