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A swarm of dusty objects in orbit around the central star of planetary nebula WeSb 1

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Abstract

Exoplanets and smaller bodies have been detected orbiting different kind of stars. However, we do not know of any such objects in planetary nebulae, the short-lived stage of stellar evolution between the asymptotic giant branch and white dwarf phases. The planetary activity (destruction and formation) may be accompanied by dust clouds. Hence, we searched for dust occultation events in planetary nebulae using archival photometric data. We show that the central star of PN WeSb 1 features numerous dimming events with typical durations of a few days to weeks that are up to 3 mag deep. This variability is mainly stochastic with an indication of a 400 d period. The occultations are almost grey, indicating dust grains larger than about 0.1 μm. Based on our follow-up observations, we argue that the central star is a wide binary and that these events are most probably caused by debris from disintegrated small rocky bodies that escaped from the former asymptotic giant branch star to find safe harbour around the companion star. The latter star dominates the optical spectrum enabling us to see the eclipses. This means that planetary systems are present and undergo violent evolution during the planetary nebula stage.

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Fig. 1: Long-term variability of planetary nebula WeSb 1 at various filters.
Fig. 2: Deep eclipse event in July to October 2021.
Fig. 3: SED of WeSb 1.
Fig. 4: Synthetic colour image of WeSb 1.
Fig. 5: Spectra of WeSb 1.

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Data availability

All of the most relevant photometric data that we used are from the ZTF44, Gaia40,41, ASAS-SN36,37 and TESS47 projects. The data are publicly available. All proprietary data are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Code availability

The code that we used to model the SED is an adapted version of the code presented in ref. 58 and can be found at https://github.com/JamesMunday98/WD-BASS.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge P. Frank for his help with the PTF data reduction, P. Sivanic, T. Pribulla and L. Hambalek for their consultations on the observations and data reduction at Skalnaté Pleso Observatory, C. Morisset, J. Garcá Rojas and A. Skopal for their insight into the temperature of the central star, and M. Groenewegen for his Fortran version of the G23 dust extinction curve. J.B. was supported by the VEGA 2/0031/22 and APVV 20-0148 grants. D.J. acknowledges support from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MCIU/AEI) under grant ‘Nebulosas planetarias como clave para comprender la evolución de estrellas binarias’ and the European Regional Development Fund (Ref. PID-2022-136653NA-I00, https://doi.org/10.13039/50110001103). D.J. also acknowledges support from the MCIU/AEI under grant ‘Revolucionando el conocimiento de la evolución de estrellas poco masivas’ and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR (Ref. No. CNS2023-143910, https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033). J.M. was supported by funding from a Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) studentship. This paper makes use of data from DR1 from WASP39 as provided by the WASP consortium and computational resources supplied by the project ‘e-Infrastruktura CZ’ (e-INFRA CZ LM2018140) supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. The work is partly based on observations obtained with the 48 inch Samuel Oschin Telescope and the 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the ZTF project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437) and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IN2P3, the University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum, Northwestern University and former partners the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Operations were conducted by COO, IPAC and UW. This publication makes use of data products from WISE, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This publication also makes use of data products from NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology and funded by the Planetary Science Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia multilateral agreement. This publication makes use of VOSA, developed under the Spanish Virtual Observatory project supported by the Spanish MICINN (Grant No. AyA2008-02156). The work is partly based on observations made with NOT, which is owned by a collaboration of the University of Turku and Aarhus University and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo (representing Denmark, Finland and Norway) and the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. The data presented here were obtained in part with the Alhambra Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOT. We used the FIEStool pipeline (www.not.iac.es/instruments/fies/fiestool/FIEStool.html). The work is partly based on observations made with the INT operated on the island of La Palma by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. This research made use of Montage, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. ACI-1440620) and was previously funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology. IRAF is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. We used MuniWin v.2.0 (http://c-munipack.sourceforge.net). This work has made use of data from the ATLAS project. ATLAS is primarily funded to search for near-Earth asteroids through NASA (Grant Nos. NN12AR55G, 80NSSC18K0284 and 80NSSC18K1575). By-products of the NEO search include images and catalogues from the survey area. This work was partially funded by Kepler/K2 grant J1944/80NSSC19K0112 and HST GO-15889, and STFC grants ST/T000198/1 and ST/S006109/1. The ATLAS science products have been made possible through the contributions of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Queen’s University Belfast, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Chile. This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission directorate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovak Republic

    Jan Budaj

  2. Bundesdeutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Veränderliche Sterne e.V. (BAV), Berlin, Germany

    Klaus Bernhard

  3. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Spain

    David Jones

  4. Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain

    David Jones

  5. Nordic Optical Telescope, Breña Baja, Spain

    David Jones

  6. Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    James Munday

Authors
  1. Jan Budaj
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  2. Klaus Bernhard
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  3. David Jones
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  4. James Munday
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Contributions

J.B. conceived the main idea and performed most of the analysis, interpretation and writing, plus some observations and data reduction (1.3 m telescope). K.B. performed the main search for variable objects, period analysis and data reduction (1.3 m, TESS) and contributed to several sections of the manuscript. D.J. performed observations and data analysis (imaging and spectroscopy with 2.5 m NOT and 2.5 m INT), discussed and supervised the work on planetary nebula properties, performed proofreading, and contributed to several sections of the manuscript. J.M. performed observations and data analysis (2.5 m NOT and 2.5 m INT), performed the SED modelling and contributed significantly to the section on SED.

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Correspondence to Jan Budaj.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Marcin Hajduk and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–12, Tables 1–4 and Discussion.

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Budaj, J., Bernhard, K., Jones, D. et al. A swarm of dusty objects in orbit around the central star of planetary nebula WeSb 1. Nat Astron (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02446-x

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