Abstract
AU Microscopii (AU Mic) is the second closest pre-main-sequence star, at a distance of 9.79 parsecs and with an age of 22 million years1. AU Mic possesses a relatively rare2 and spatially resolved3 edge-on debris disk extending from about 35 to 210 astronomical units from the star4, and with clumps exhibiting non-Keplerian motion5,6,7. Detection of newly formed planets around such a star is challenged by the presence of spots, plage, flares and other manifestations of magnetic ‘activity’ on the star8,9. Here we report observations of a planet transiting AU Mic. The transiting planet, AU Mic b, has an orbital period of 8.46 days, an orbital distance of 0.07 astronomical units, a radius of 0.4 Jupiter radii, and a mass of less than 0.18 Jupiter masses at 3σ confidence. Our observations of a planet co-existing with a debris disk offer the opportunity to test the predictions of current models of planet formation and evolution.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
In addition to the figure data available, all raw spectroscopic data are available either in the associated observatory archive or upon request from the corresponding author. The TESS light curve is available at the MAST archive, and the SuperWASP light curve is available at the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
All code that is not readily available on GitHub is available upon request.
Change history
15 July 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2516-1
References
Mamajek, E. E. & Bell, C. P. M. On the age of the β Pictoris moving group. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 445, 2169–2180 (2014).
Plavchan, P., Jura, M. & Lipscy, S. J. Where are the M dwarf disks older than 10 million years? Astrophys. J. 631, 1161 (2005).
Kalas, P., Liu, M. C. & Matthews, B. C. Discovery of a large dust disk around the nearby star AU Microscopii. Science 303, 1990–1992 (2004).
Strubbe, L. E. & Chiang, E. I. Dust dynamics, surface brightness profiles, and thermal spectra of debris disks: the case of AU Microscopii. Astrophys. J. 648, 652 (2006).
Boccaletti, A. et al. Fast-moving features in the debris disk around AU Microscopii. Nature 526, 230–232 (2015).
Chiang, E. & Fung, J. Stellar winds and dust avalanches in the AU Mic debris disk. Astrophys. J. 848, 4 (2017)
Sezestre, É. et al. Expelled grains from an unseen parent body around AU Microscopii. Astron. Astrophys. 607, A65 (2017).
van Eyken, J. et al. The PTF Orion project: a possible planet transiting a T-Tauri star. Astrophys. J. 755, 42 (2012).
Donati, J. F. et al. A hot Jupiter orbiting a 2-million-year-old solar-mass T Tauri star. Nature 534, 662–666 (2016).
Ricker, G. R. et al. Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). J. Astron. Telesc. Instrum. Syst. 1, 014003 (2014).
Deming, D. et al. Spitzer secondary eclipses of the dense, modestly-irradiated, giant exoplanet HAT-P-20b using pixel-level decorrelation. Astrophys. J. 805, 132 (2015).
Lannier, J. et al. Combining direct imaging and radial velocity data towards a full exploration of the giant planet population. I. Method and first results. Astron. Astrophys. 603, A54 (2017).
Kley, W. & Nelson, R. P. Planet-disk interaction and orbital evolution. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 50, 211–249 (2012).
Snellen, I. A. G. & Brown, A. G. A. The mass of the young planet Beta Pictoris b through the astrometric motion of its host star. Nature Astron. 2, 883–886 (2018).
Plavchan, P. et al. New debris disks around young, low-mass stars discovered with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Astrophys. J. 698, 1068–1094 (2009).
MacGregor, M. A. et al. Millimeter emission structure in the first ALMA image of the AU Mic debris disk. Astrophys. J. 762, L21 (2013).
White, R. et al. Stellar radius measurements of the young debris disk host AU Mic. Proc. AAS Meet. 233, 348.12 (2015).
Torres, C. A. O., Ferraz Mello, S. & Quast, G. R. HD 197481: a periodic dMe variable star. Astrophys. J. 11, L13–L14 (1972).
Chen, J. & Kipping, D. Probabilistic forecasting of the masses and radii of other worlds. Astrophys. J. 834, 17 (2017).
Eggen, O. J. Narrow- and broad-band photometry of red stars. II. Dwarfs. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 16, 49 (1968).
Hebb, L. et al. A search for planets transiting the M-dwarf debris disc host, AU Microscopii. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 379, 63–72 (2007).
Pollacco, D. L. et al. The WASP project and the SuperWASP cameras. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacif. 118, 1407–1418 (2006).
Jenkins, J. et al. Overview of the Kepler science processing pipeline. Astrophys. J. 713, L87–L91 (2010).
Jenkins, J. et al. The TESS science processing operations center. Proc. SPIE 9913, 99133E (2016).
Eastman, J., Gaudi, B. S. & Agol, E. EXOFAST: a fast exoplanetary fitting suite in IDL. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacif. 125, 83 (2013).
Eastman, J. EXOFASTv2: Generalized publication-quality exoplanet modeling code. (ascl:1710.003, Astrophysics Source Code Library, 2017).
Kipping, D. Characterizing distant worlds with asterodensity profiling. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 440, 2164–2184 (2014).
Stumpe, M. C. et al. Multiscale systematic error correction via wavelet-based bandsplitting in Kepler data. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacif. 126, 100 (2014).
Smith, J. C. et al. Kepler presearch data conditioning II — a Bayesian approach to systematic error correction. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacif. 124, 1000 (2012).
Rayner, J. T. et al. iSHELL: a construction, assembly and testing. Proc. SPIE 9908, 990884 (2016).
Cale, B. et al. Precise radial velocities of cool low mass stars with iSHELL. Astron. J. 158, 170 (2019).
Mayor, M. et al. Setting new standards with HARPS. Messenger 114, 20 (2003).
Howard, A. W. et al. The California Planet Survey. I. Four new giant exoplanets. Astrophys. J. 721, 1467–1481 (2010).
Anglada-Escudé, G. & Butler, R. P. The HARPS-TERRA project. I. Description of the algorithms, performance, and new measurements on a few remarkable stars observed by HARPS. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 200, 15 (2012).
Reiners, A. et al. Detecting planets around very low mass stars with the radial velocity method. Astrophys. J. 710, 432–443 (2010).
Tal-Or, L. et al. The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs. Radial-velocity variations of active stars in visual-channel spectra. Astron. Astrophys. 614, A122 (2018).
Haywood, R. Hide and Seek: Radial-Velocity Searches for Planets around Active Stars. PhD thesis, Univ. St Andrews (2015).
Barnes, J. R. et al. Recovering planet radial velocity signals in the presence of starspot activity in fully convective stars. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 466, 1733–1740 (2017).
Fulton, B. J., Petigura, E. A., Blunt, S. & Sinukoff, E. RadVel: the radial velocity modeling toolkit. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacif. 130, 044504 (2018).
Vanderburg, A. et al. The Goldilocks trap: stellar activity masquerading as habitable exoplanets. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 459, 3565 (2016).
Nava, C. et al. Exoplanet imitators: a test of stellar activity behavior in radial velocity signals. Astron. J. 159, 23 (2020).
Reiners, A. et al. Radial velocity signatures of Zeeman broadening. Astron. Astrophys. 552, A103 (2013).
Marchwinski, R. C. et al. Toward understanding stellar radial velocity jitter as a function of wavelength: the Sun as a proxy. Astrophys. J. 798, 63 (2015).
Cody, A. M. et al. CSI 2264: Simultaneous optical and infrared light curves of young disk-bearing stars in NGC 2264 with CoRoT and Spitzer — evidence for multiple origins of variability. Astron. J. 147, 82 (2014).
Parks, J. R. et al. Periodic and aperiodic variability in the molecular cloud ρ Ophiuchus. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 211, 3 (2014).
Baraffe, I. et al. New evolutionary models for pre-main sequence and main sequence low-mass stars down to the hydrogen-burning limit. Astron. Astrophys. 577, A42 (2015).
Nortmann, L. et al. Ground-based detection of an extended helium atmosphere in the Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-69b. Science 362, 1388–1391 (2018).
Allart, R. et al. Spectrally resolved helium absorption from the extended atmosphere of a warm Neptune-mass exoplanet. Science 362, 1384–1387 (2018).
Wang, J. J. et al. Gemini Planet Imager observations of the AU Microscopii debris disk: asymmetries within one arcsecond. Astrophys. J. 811, L19 (2015).
Roccatagliata, V. et al. Long-wavelength observations of debris discs around sun-like stars. Astron. Astrophys. 497, 409–421 (2009).
Wilson, P. A. et al. Detection of nitrogen gas in the β Pictoris circumstellar disc. Astron. Astrophys. 621, A121 (2019).
Nettelmann, N. et al. Uranus evolution models with simple thermal boundary layers. Icarus 275, 107 (2016).
Linder, E. et al. Evolutionary models of cold and low-mass planets: cooling curves, magnitudes, and detectability. Astron. Astrophys. 623, A85 (2019).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants to P.P. from NASA (award 16-APROBES16-0020 and support from the Exoplanet Exploration Program) and the National Science Foundation (Astronomy and Astrophysics grant 1716202), the Mount Cuba Astronomical Foundation and George Mason University start-up funds.The NASA Infrared Telescope Facility is operated by the University of Hawaii under contract NNH14CK55B with NASA. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission directorate. Some of the data presented here were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. This research has made use of the services of the ESO Science Archive Facility, based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere with the HARPS spectrometer. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia, processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. MINERVA-Australis is supported by Australian Research Council LIEF Grant LE160100001, Discovery Grant DP180100972, Mount Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and institutional partners University of Southern Queensland, MIT, Nanjing University, George Mason University, University of Louisville, University of California Riverside, University of Florida and University of Texas at Austin. This work was partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant numbers JP18H01265 and 18H05439, JST PRESTO grant number JPMJPR1775, NSFC grant number 11673011 and MINECO grant ESP2016-80435-C2-2-R. D.D. acknowledges support for this work provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51372.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute. B.P.B. acknowledges support from National Science Foundation grant AST-1909209. J.W. and P.G. acknowledge support from the Heising-Simons Foundation 51 Pegasi b fellowship.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
P.P.: lead author, principal investigator for CSHELL/iSHELL gas cell and observations, analysis and interpretation. J.G., P.G., B.C., A.T., S.X.W., R.W.: CSHELL/iSHELL data reduction and forward model codes. W.M.: RADVEL analysis. T.B., D.D., S.Q., D.F.-M., E. Gilbert, C. Huang, D.K., E.K., E.V.Q., A.V.: analysis of TESS light curve. K.S., K.C., N.N., E.P., J.P.: follow-up ground-based observations. I.J.M.C., D.A.B., P.L., E.N.: Spitzer light curve. D.F., B.T., C. Hellier: inspection of ground-based light curves. D.W.L.: TRES. G.A.-E.: HARPS. G.R., R.V., S.S., J.N.W., J.M.J.: TESS mission architects. S.R., A.K., S.D., J.T.: TESS mission. F.A., M.C., M.K., A.R., V.R., J.W.: disk physics. D.A.A., J.E.S., A.Y.: flare analysis. C. Beichman, M.B., C. Brinkworth, D.R.C., S.R.K., B.M., S.M.M., K.v.B.: CSHELL/iSHELL instrumentation. B.P.B., C.J.B., J.T.C., J. Horner, J.K., J.O., C.G.T., R.A.W., D.J.W., H.Z.: MINERVA-Australis. A.C., C.D., E.F., C.G., F.G., R.H., T.H., J.H., C.K., N.L., M.M., T.M., A.N., J.T., B.W., D.W., P.Z.: CSHELL/iSHELL observers. E.J.G.: stellar parameters. A.W.H.: Keck HIRES.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Peer review information Nature thanks Suzanne Aigrain and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Fig. 1 TESS and Spitzer light curves for AU Mic centred on four transit events.
a, b, Two TESS transits (respectively 1 and 2) for AU Mic b, with the model components plotted as indicated in the key. A flare is present during the egress of the first transit of AU Mic b, and a flare is present just after the ingress during the second transit of AU Mic b. Although this is unfortunate timing, flares of this amplitude are pervasive throughout the TESS light curve for AU Mic, and complicate the recovery of these events from automated transit search algorithms. c, The Spitzer transit observation of AU Mic b. The deviations in transit are not instrumental and will be the subject of a future paper, and are likely to be related to the planet crossing large active regions on the stellar surface (key from a and b applies here). d, The ~1 p.p.t. candidate single transit event seen in the TESS light curve. For all panels, 1σ measurement uncertainties are suppressed for visual clarity and are <1 p.p.t. 1σ model uncertainties in transit are shown as shaded regions.
Extended Data Fig. 2 MCMC corner plot for custom combined Spitzer and TESS light-curve analysis for AU Mic.
The full set of model parameters are shown, with the posterior probability distributions along the diagonal, the others are the two-dimensional parameter covariance plots.
Extended Data Fig. 3 One season (July to October 2007) of SuperWASP light curves for AU Mic from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, phase-folded to the rotation period of the star.
Measurements with large photometric uncertainties (>5%) have been excluded from the plot. 1σ measurement uncertainties are suppressed for visual clarity and are typically <1% but occasionally up to 5% at phases where there is more apparent vertical scatter in the measurement values themselves.
Extended Data Fig. 4 Correlation plots of the standard HARPS stellar activity indicators with the RVs.
The bisector values for the cross-correlation function (‘CCF bisector’), but not the activity indicators (Hα, Na D, Ca ii H and K), show a correlation with the RVs, with substantial remaining scatter. Formal uncertainties are smaller than the plotted symbols.
Extended Data Fig. 5 Correlation plots of the HARPS activity indicators with each other.
The activity indicators Ca ii H and K, Hα, and Na D are strongly correlated with one another, but not with the RVs or with the CCF bisector.
Extended Data Fig. 6 The HARPS RVs and standard activity indicators, phase folded to the rotation period of the star.
Blue circles, HARPS RVs; black circles, standard activity indicators. None of the activity indicators show a statistically significant trend with the period of AU Mic b. The Ca and Na activity indicators appear to show (by eye) some cyclic variation with the rotation period of the star. Formal uncertainties are smaller than the plotted symbols.
Extended Data Fig. 7 RV time-series of AU Mic, with fitting residuals, and phased to the orbital period of AU Mic b.
Shown are data from three spectrometers: iSHELL (yellow circles), HIRES (black circles) and HARPS (red squares). Uncertainties shown are 1σ for HARPS and iSHELL. For HIRES, a 5 m s−1 minimum 1σ uncertainty is adopted, although the formal 1σ uncertainties are smaller for all but one epoch at 5.43 m s−1. The maximum-likelihood best fit model is overlaid in blue, with shaded regions indicating the 1σ model confidence interval, with a separate GP for each dataset indicated with different coloured shaded regions. b, Model-subtracted residuals, with the same colours as in a. Because our RVs are undersampled with respect to the stellar rotation period38, the GP best-fit model overfits the AU Mic RV time-series. c, RV measurements are phased to the orbital period of AU Mic b, and binned in phase (red circles). The blue curve is a maximum-likelihood best-fit circular orbit model, after subtracting the best fit GP model of stellar activity and the modelled instrument offsets. The plot is labelled with the best-fit orbital period Pb, velocity semi-amplitude Kb, and the assumed circular orbit (eb = 0).
Extended Data Fig. 8 RADVEL MCMC corner plot for the model parameters for the iSHELL, HARPS and HIRES RV datasets.
Along the diagonal are the one-dimensional posterior probability distributions for a given model parameter; the others are the two-dimensional parameter covariance plots.
Extended Data Fig. 9 Photometric variability amplitudes obtained contemporaneously in four different bandpasses.
Source data
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Plavchan, P., Barclay, T., Gagné, J. et al. A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii. Nature 582, 497–500 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2400-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2400-z
This article is cited by
-
Rapid contraction of giant planets orbiting the 20-million-year-old star V1298 Tau
Nature Astronomy (2021)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.
