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Table · dataset · 2017

beta Pic HARPS spectrum

Listed in IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory)

The young planetary system beta Pictoris is surrounded by a circumstellar disk of dust and gas.

Description

Because both dust and gas have a lifetime shorter than the system age, they need to be replenished continuously. The gas composition is partly known, but its location and its origin are still a puzzle.

The gas source could be the exocomets (or so-called falling and evaporating bodies, FEBs), which are observed as transient features in absorption lines of refractory elements (Mg, Ca, and Fe) when they transit in front of the star at several tens of stellar radii. Nearly 1700 high-resolution spectra of beta Pictoris have been obtained from 2003 to 2015 using the HARPS spectrograph. In these spectra, the circumstellar disk is always detected as a stable component among the numerous variable absorption signatures of transiting exocomets.

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Summing all the 1700 spectra allowed us to reach a signal-to-noise ratio higher than 1000, which is an unprecedentedly high number for a beta Pictoris spectrum. It revealed many weak Fe I absorption lines of the circumstellar gas in more than ten excited states. These weak lines bring new information on the physical properties of the neutral iron gas in the circumstellar disk.

The population of the first excited levels follows a Boltzmann distribution with a slope consistent with a gas temperature of about 1300K; this temperature corresponds to a distance to the star of ~38 R_star_ and implies a turbulence of ksi~0.8km/s.

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Catalogue records · 2

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Astronomical sciences 71%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
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IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory)ivo://cds.vizier/j/a+a/607/a2515 d agoJSON v1
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concepts[field].anzsrc:group:5101enrichment · IVOA Registrytaxonomy-embedding@1.1.0title+keywords+description (71%)
concepts[field].local:field:astronomymapping · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
descriptionsource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0rr.resource.res_description
license_textsource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
publication_datesource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
titlesource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0rr.resource.res_title
updated_datesource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0