Searching for Planets Orbiting ϵ Eridani with JWST/NIRCam
Creators
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1.
Jet Propulsion Lab
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2.
NASA Exoplanet Science Institute
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3.
University of Arizona
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4.
Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics
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5.
California Institute of Technology
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6.
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
Abstract
We present observations of ϵ Eridani with the JWST/NIRCam coronagraph aimed at imaging planets orbiting within this system. In particular, these observations targeted (1) the Jupiter-like planet, first detected orbiting at 3.5 au with radial velocity observations, and (2) the planet postulated to be responsible for carving the edges of ϵ Eridani’s outer ring, expected to orbit at 40–50 au. However, no point sources were detected at a statistically significant level. We report new, improved upper limits at 4 μm: ∼1 × 10−6 contrast at 1″, and ∼2 × 10−8 beyond 5″. The latter contrast limit precludes Saturn-mass planets at separations >16 au given current models. We also report upper limits for ϵ Eridani’s disk emission at 4 μm. While the radial surface brightness profile shows no evidence of emission, we detect a 1σ surface brightness signal on the east side of the system, consistent with forward scattering emission expected for ϵ Eridani’s disk inclination. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the 3-roll observation strategy, which was first employed in these observations: the gains in contrast are modest, with 20%–30% improvements with respect to the conventional two-roll strategy.
Copyright and License
© 2025. 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
.Ll.-S. thanks Virginie Faramaz for a fruitful discussion about Eridani’s disk. NIRCam development and use at the University of Arizona is supported through NASA Contract NAS5-02105. Part of this work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). The work of A.G., G.R., and S.W. was partially supported by NASA grants NNX13AD82G and 1255094. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 2139433. The High Performance Computing resources used in this investigation were provided by funding from the JPL Information and Technology Solutions Directorate. We are grateful for support from NASA for the JWST NIRCam project though contract number NAS5-02105 (M. Rieke, University of Arizona, PI).
Facilities
JWST - James Webb Space Telescope.
Software References
astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2022), jwst (H. Bushouse et al. 2022), NIRCoS (J. Kammerer et al. 2022), pyNRC (J. Leisenring 2024, in preparation), pyKLIP (J. J. Wang et al. 2015), SpaceKLIP (J. Kammerer et al. 2022), STPSF (M. D. Perrin et al. 2014), WebbPSF_ext (J. Leisenring 2025, in preparation).
Files
Llop-Sayson_2025_AJ_170_229.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2508.08463 (arXiv)
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NAS5-02105
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NM0018D0004
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NNX13AD82G
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 1255094
- National Science Foundation
- DGE-2139433
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-08-01
- Available
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2025-09-17Published online