A TESS primary mission search finds five new exocomet-like transit candidates and estimates a 2.64e-4 per star per year occurrence rate, concluding such transits are rare at 0.1% to 1% depths.
Hint of an exocomet transit in the CHEOPS lightcurve of HD 172555
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
HD$\,$172555 is a young ($\sim$20$\,$Myr) A7V star surrounded by a 10$\,$au wide debris disk suspected to be replenished partly by collisions between large planetesimals. Small evaporating transiting bodies, exocomets, have also been detected in this system by spectroscopy. After $\beta\,$Pictoris, this is another example of a system possibly witnessing a phase of heavy bombardment of planetesimals. In such system, small bodies trace dynamical evolution processes. We aim at constraining their dust content by using transit photometry. We performed a 2-day-long photometric monitoring of HD$\,$172555 with the CHEOPS space telescope in order to detect shallow transits of exocomets with a typical expected duration of a few hours. The large oscillations in the lightcurve indicate that HD$\,$172555 is a $\delta\,$Scuti pulsating star. Once removing those dominating oscillations, we find a hint for a transient absorption. If fitted with an exocomet transit model, it corresponds to an evaporating body passing near the star at a distance of $6.8\pm1.4\,$R$_\star$ (or $0.05\pm 0.01\,$au) with a radius of 2.5 km. These properties are comparable to those of the exocomets already found in this system using spectroscopy, as well as those found in the $\beta\,$Pic system. The nuclei of solar system's Jupiter family comets, with radii of 2-6$\,$km, are also comparable in size. This is the first evidence for an exocomet photometric transit detection in the young system of HD$\,$172555.
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astro-ph.EP 1years
2025 1verdicts
CONDITIONAL 1representative citing papers
citing papers explorer
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A Search for Transiting Exocomets in TESS Sectors 1-26
A TESS primary mission search finds five new exocomet-like transit candidates and estimates a 2.64e-4 per star per year occurrence rate, concluding such transits are rare at 0.1% to 1% depths.