JWST/NIRCam Detection of the Fomalhaut C Debris Disk in Scattered Light

Copyright and License

© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank our referee, whose comments helped us to improve both the content and clarity of this manuscript.

We acknowledge the decades of immense effort that enabled the successful launch and commissioning of the JWST; these results were possible only through the concerted determination of thousands of people involved in the JWST mission. In particular, we offer gratitude to a number of individuals who (among others) enabled this study through contributions to either the 2002 NIRCam instrument proposal, the development and commissioning of the NIRCam instrument, or the commissioning of the NIRCam coronagraphy mode: Martha Boyer, Alicia Canipe, Eiichi Egami, Daniel Eisenstein, Bryan Hilbert, Klaus Hodapp, Scott Horner, Doug Kelly, John Krist, Don McCarthy, Karl Misselt, George Rieke, John Stansberry, and Erick Young. We are grateful for support from NASA through the JWST NIRCam project, contract No. NAS5-02105 (M. Rieke, University of Arizona, PI).

The authors thank G. Kennedy for sharing the reduced ALMA data for use in reproducing the Cronin-Coltsmann et al. (2021) contours in our Figure 1.

The JWST data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The specific observations analyzed can be accessed via 10.17909/he30-tx49. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5–26555. Support to MAST for these data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NAG5–7584 and by other grants and contracts.

This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This research made use of POPPY, an open-source optical propagation Python package originally developed for the James Webb Space Telescope project (Perrin, 2012).

K. Lawson's research was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the NASA–Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA.

E. Bogat's work was supported by a grant from the Seller's Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC) at NASA GSFC, administered through NASA's Internal Scientist Funding Model (ISFM).

Software References

Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), CuPy (Okuta et al. 2017), LMFIT (Newville et al. 2022), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007; Caswell et al. 2021), NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), POPPY (Perrin et al. 2012), pyKLIP (Wang et al. 2015), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), SpaceKLIP (Kammerer et al. 2022), Vortex Image Processing (Gomez Gonzalez et al. 2017), WebbPSF (Perrin et al. 2014), WebbPSF_ext (Leisenring 2021)