Millimeter Dust Emission and Planetary Dynamics in the HD 106906 System

Abstract

Debris disks are dusty, optically thin structures around main-sequence stars. HD 106906AB is a short-period stellar binary, host to a wide-separation planet, HD 106906b, and a debris disk. Only a few known systems include a debris disk and a directly imaged planet, and HD 106906 is the only one in which the planet is exterior to the disk. The debris disk is edge-on and highly asymmetric in scattered light. Here we resolve the disk structure at a resolution of 0.″38 (39 au) with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. We model the disk with both a narrow and broad ring of material, and find that a radially broad, axisymmetric disk between radii of ∼50–100 au is able to capture the structure of the observations without evidence of any asymmetry or eccentricity, other than a tentative stellocentric offset. We place stringent upper limits on both the gas and dust contents of a putative circumplanetary disk. We interpret the ALMA data in concert with scattered-light observations of the inner ring and astrometric constraints on the planet’s orbit, and find that the observations are consistent with a large-separation, low-eccentricity orbit for the planet. A dynamical analysis indicates that the central binary can efficiently stabilize planetesimal orbits interior to ∼100 au, which somewhat relaxes the constraints on the eccentricity and semimajor axis. The observational constraints are consistent with in-situ formation via gravitational instability but cannot rule out a scattering event as the origin for HD 106906b’s current orbit.