We present ∼0 4 resolution images of CO(3-2) and associated continuum emission from the gas-bearing debris disk around the nearby A star 49 Ceti, observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). We analyze the ALMA visibilities in tandem with the broadband spectral energy distribution to measure the radial surface density profiles of dust and gas emission from the system. The dust surface density decreases with radius between ∼100 and 310 au, with a marginally significant enhancement of surface density at a radius of ∼110 au. The SED requires an inner disk of small grains in addition to the outer disk of larger grains resolved by ALMA. The gas disk exhibits a surface density profile that increases with radius, contrary to most previous spatially resolved observations of circumstellar gas disks. While ∼80% of the CO flux is well described by an axisymmetric power-law disk in Keplerian rotation about the central star, residuals at ∼20% of the peak flux exhibit a departure from axisymmetry suggestive of spiral arms or a warp in the gas disk. The radial extent of the gas disk (∼220 au) is smaller than that of the dust disk (∼300 au), consistent with recent observations of other gasbearing debris disks. While there are so far only three broad debris disks with wellcharacterized radial dust profiles at millimeter wavelengths, 49 Ceti's disk shows a markedly different structure from two radially resolved gas-poor debris disks, implying that the physical processes generating and sculpting the gas and dust are fundamentally different.
The vertical distribution of dust in debris disks is sensitive to the number and size of large planetesimals dynamically stirring the disk, and is therefore well-suited for constraining the prevalence of otherwise unobservable Uranus and Neptune analogs. Information regarding stirring bodies has previously been inferred from infrared and optical observations of debris disk vertical structure, but theoretical works predict that the small particles traced by short-wavelength observations will be 'puffed up' by radiation pressure, yielding only upper limits. The large grains that dominate the disk emission at millimeter wavelengths are much less sensitive to the effects of stellar radiation or stellar winds, and therefore trace the underlying mass distribution more directly. Here we present ALMA 1.3 mm dust continuum observations of the debris disk around the nearby M star AU Mic. The 3 au spatial resolution of the observations, combined with the favorable edge-on geometry of the system, allows us to measure the vertical thickness of the disk. We report a scale height-to-radius aspect ratio of h = 0.031 +0.005 −0.004 between radii of ∼ 23 au and ∼ 41 au. Comparing this aspect ratio to a theoretical model of size-dependent velocity distributions in the collisional cascade, we find that the perturbing bodies embedded in the local disk must be larger than about 400 km, and the largest perturbing body must be smaller than roughly 1.8 M ⊕ . These measurements rule out the presence of a gas giant or Neptune analog near the ∼ 40 au outer edge of the debris ring, but are suggestive of large planetesimals or an Earth-sized planet stirring the dust distribution.
We present measurements of the E-mode (EE) polarization power spectrum and temperature-E-mode (TE) cross-power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background using data collected by SPT-3G, the latest instrument installed on the South Pole Telescope. This analysis uses observations of a 1500 deg 2 region at 95, 150, and 220 GHz taken over a four-month period in 2018. We report binned values of the EE and TE power spectra over the angular multipole range 300 ≤ l < 3000, using the multifrequency data to construct six semi-independent estimates of each power spectrum and their minimum-variance combination. These measurements improve upon the previous results of SPTpol across the multipole ranges 300 ≤ l ≤ 1400 for EE and 300 ≤ l ≤ 1700 for TE, resulting in constraints on cosmological parameters comparable to those from other current leading ground-based experiments. We find that the SPT-3G data set is well fit by a ΛCDM cosmological model with parameter constraints consistent with those from Planck and SPTpol data. From SPT-3G data alone, we find H 0 ¼ 68.8 AE 1.5 km s −1 Mpc −1 and σ 8 ¼ 0.789 AE 0.016, with a gravitational lensing amplitude consistent with the ΛCDM prediction (A L ¼ 0.98 AE 0.12). We combine the SPT-3G and the Planck data sets and obtain joint constraints on the ΛCDM model. The volume of the 68% confidence region in six-dimensional ΛCDM parameter space is reduced by a factor of 1.5 compared to Planck-only constraints, with no significant shifts in central values. We note that the results presented here are obtained from data collected during just half of a typical observing season with only part of the focal plane operable, and that the active detector count has since nearly doubled for observations made with SPT-3G after 2018.
We present spatially resolved Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) images of 12 CO J = 3 − 2 emission from the protoplanetary disk around the Herbig Ae star, HD 100546. We expand upon earlier analyses of this data and model the spatiallyresolved kinematic structure of the CO emission. Assuming a velocity profile which prescribes a flat or flared emitting surface in Keplerian rotation, we uncover significant residuals with a peak of ≈ 7δv, where δv = 0.21 km s −1 is the width of a single spectral resolution element. The shape and extent of the residuals reveal the possible presence of a severely warped and twisted inner disk extending to at most 100 au. Adapting the model to include a misaligned inner gas disk with (i) an inclination almost edge-on to the line of sight, and (ii) a position angle almost orthogonal to that of the outer disk reduces the residuals to < 3δv. However, these findings are contrasted by recent VLT/SPHERE, MagAO/GPI, and VLTI/PIONIER observations of HD 100546 that show no evidence of a severely misaligned inner dust disk down to spatial scales of ∼ 1 au. An alternative explanation for the observed kinematics are fast radial flows mediated by (proto)planets. Inclusion of a radial velocity component at close to free-fall speeds and inwards of ≈ 50 au results in residuals of ≈ 4δv. Hence, the model including a radial velocity component only does not reproduce the data as well as that including a twisted and misaligned inner gas disk. Molecular emission data at a higher spatial resolution (of order 10 au) are required to further constrain the kinematics within 100 au. HD 100546 joins several other protoplanetary disks for which high spectral resolution molecular emission shows that the gas velocity structure cannot be described by a purely Keplerian velocity profile with a universal inclination and position angle. Regardless of the process, the most likely cause is the presence of an unseen planetary companion.
High angular resolution cosmic microwave background experiments provide a unique opportunity to conduct a survey of time-variable sources at millimeter wavelengths, a population that has primarily been understood through follow-up measurements of detections in other bands. Here we report the first results of an astronomical transient survey with the South Pole Telescope (SPT) using the SPT-3G camera to observe 1500 deg 2 of the southern sky. The observations took place from 2020 March to November in three bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. This survey yielded the detection of 15 transient events from sources not previously detected by the SPT. The majority
SPT-3G is the third survey receiver operating on the South Pole Telescope dedicated to high-resolution observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Sensitive measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the CMB provide a powerful data set for constraining cosmology. Additionally, CMB surveys with arcminute-scale resolution are capable of detecting galaxy clusters, millimeter-wave bright galaxies, and a variety of transient phenomena. The SPT-3G instrument provides a significant improvement in mapping speed over its predecessors, SPT-SZ and SPTpol. The broadband optics design of the instrument achieves a 430 mm diameter image plane across observing bands of 95, 150, and 220 GHz, with 1.2′ FWHM beam response at 150 GHz. In the receiver, this image plane is populated with 2690 dual-polarization, trichroic pixels (∼16,000 detectors) read out using a 68× digital frequency-domain multiplexing readout system. In 2018, SPT-3G began a multiyear survey of 1500 deg2 of the southern sky. We summarize the unique optical, cryogenic, detector, and readout technologies employed in SPT-3G, and we report on the integrated performance of the instrument.
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We perform the first simultaneous Bayesian parameter inference and optimal reconstruction of the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), using 100 deg2 of polarization observations from the SPTpol receiver on the South Pole Telescope. These data reach noise levels as low as 5.8 μK arcmin in polarization, which are low enough that the typically used quadratic estimator (QE) technique for analyzing CMB lensing is significantly suboptimal. Conversely, the Bayesian procedure extracts all lensing information from the data and is optimal at any noise level. We infer the amplitude of the gravitational lensing potential to be A ϕ = 0.949 ± 0.122 using the Bayesian pipeline, consistent with our QE pipeline result, but with 17% smaller error bars. The Bayesian analysis also provides a simple way to account for systematic uncertainties, performing a similar job as frequentist “bias hardening” or linear bias correction, and reducing the systematic uncertainty on A ϕ due to polarization calibration from almost half of the statistical error to effectively zero. Finally, we jointly constrain A ϕ along with A L, the amplitude of lensing-like effects on the CMB power spectra, demonstrating that the Bayesian method can be used to easily infer parameters both from an optimal lensing reconstruction and from the delensed CMB, while exactly accounting for the correlation between the two. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the Bayesian approach on real data, and pave the way for future analysis of deep CMB polarization measurements with SPT-3G, Simons Observatory, and CMB-S4, where improvements relative to the QE can reach 1.5 times tighter constraints on A ϕ and seven times lower effective lensing reconstruction noise.
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