| Issue |
A&A
Volume 675, July 2023
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | L1 | |
| Number of page(s) | 11 | |
| Section | Letters to the Editor | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346305 | |
| Published online | 30 June 2023 | |
Letter to the Editor
Dynamical detection of a companion driving a spiral arm in a protoplanetary disk⋆
1
Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, CNES, LAM, Marseille, France
e-mail: chen.xie@lam.fr
2
Université Côte d’Azur, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Laboratoire Lagrange, Bd de l’Observatoire, CS 34229, 06304 Nice Cedex 4, France
3
Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique (IPAG), 38000 Grenoble, France
4
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
Canada
5
Univ Lyon, Univ Claude Bernard Lyon 1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon UMR5574, 69230 Saint-Genis-Laval, France
6
Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
7
Department of Astronomy, Xiamen University, 1 Zengcuoan West Road, Xiamen, Fujian, 361005
PR China
8
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, MI, Italy
Received:
2
March
2023
Accepted:
14
June
2023
Radio and near-infrared observations have observed dozens of protoplanetary disks that host spiral arm features. Numerical simulations have shown that companions may excite spiral density waves in protoplanetary disks via companion–disk interaction. However, the lack of direct observational evidence for spiral-driving companions poses challenges to current theories of companion–disk interaction. Here we report multi-epoch observations of the binary system HD 100453 with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) facility at the Very Large Telescope. By recovering the spiral features via robustly removing starlight contamination, we measure spiral motion across 4 yr to perform dynamical motion analyses. The spiral pattern motion is consistent with the orbital motion of the eccentric companion. With this first observational evidence of a companion driving a spiral arm among protoplanetary disks, we directly and dynamically confirm the long-standing theory on the origin of spiral features in protoplanetary disks. With the pattern motion of companion-driven spirals being independent of companion mass, here we establish a feasible way of searching for hidden spiral-arm-driving planets that are beyond the detection of existing ground-based high-contrast imagers.
Key words: planet-disk interactions / protoplanetary disks / techniques: high angular resolution / techniques: image processing / stars: individual: HD 100453
FITS images are only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr (130.79.128.5>) or via https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/675/L1
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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