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Published July 10, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Follow-up Exploration of the TWA 7 Planet–Disk System with JWST NIRCam

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 2. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 3. ROR icon The University of Texas at Austin
  • 4. NSF Graduate Research Fellow.
  • 5. ROR icon University of Edinburgh
  • 6. ROR icon UK Astronomy Technology Centre
  • 7. ROR icon Northwestern University
  • 8. ROR icon French National Centre for Scientific Research
  • 9. Universit, é, Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, F-38000 Grenoble, France
  • 10. ROR icon University of Hawaii at Manoa
  • 11. ROR icon University of Exeter
  • 12. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 13. ROR icon University of California, Santa Cruz
  • 14. ROR icon University of Liège
  • 15. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 16. ROR icon University of Maryland, College Park
  • 17. ROR icon University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
  • 18. ROR icon Eureka Scientific
  • 19. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
  • 20. ROR icon Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
  • 21. ROR icon Lagrange Laboratory
  • 22. ROR icon University of Montreal
  • 23. ROR icon European Southern Observatory
  • 24. ROR icon University of Arizona
  • 25. ROR icon European Space Astronomy Centre
  • 26. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 27. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 28. ROR icon University of Queensland

Abstract

The young M star TWA 7 hosts a bright and near face-on debris disk, which has been imaged from the optical to the submillimeter. The disk displays multiple complex substructures such as three disk components, a large dust clump, and spiral arms, suggesting the presence of planets to actively sculpt these features. The evidence for planets in this disk was further strengthened with the recent detection of a point source compatible with a Saturn-mass planet companion using JWST/MIRI at 11 μm, at the location a planet was predicted to reside based on the disk morphology. In this Letter, we present new observations of the TWA 7 system with JWST/NIRCam in the F200W and F444W filters. The disk is detected at both wavelengths and presents many of the same substructures as previously imaged, although we do not robustly detect the southern spiral arm. Furthermore, we detect two faint potential companions in the F444W filter at the 2σ–3σ level. While one of these companions needs further follow-up to determine its nature, the other one coincides with the location of the planet candidate imaged with MIRI, providing further evidence that this source is a sub-Jupiter-mass planet companion rather than a background galaxy. Such discoveries make TWA 7 only the second system, after β Pictoris, in which a planet predicted by the debris disk morphology has been detected.

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

The authors wish to thank the anonymous referee for helpful suggestions that improved this manuscript. This work is based on observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. These observations are associated with the JWST program 4050 (PI: A. Carter). The JWST data presented in this Letter were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The specific observations analyzed can be accessed via doi: 10.17909/19et-s876. Support for program 4050 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. This work benefited from the 2024 Exoplanet Summer Program in the Other Worlds Laboratory (OWL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a program funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. 2139433. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (COBREX; grant agreement #885593). C.V.M. and J.M. acknowledge the support of STScI grants JWST-AR-01977.004-A, JWST-GO-02327.010-A, JWST-AR-03245.004-A, JWST-GO-03337.004-A, and JWST-GO-04050.009-A. C.V.M. acknowledges support of NASA XRP grant 80NSSC24K0958. J.M. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant No. DGE 2137420.

These JWST observations were supported with high-resolution speckle imaging obtained via the community program for High-Resolution Imaging, PI: Steve B. Howell (NASA/Ames). This program is supported by the NASA Exoplanet Program Office. We are also grateful to Christian Ginski, Colin Littlefield, Catherine Clark, and Elise Furlan for their support with ground-based binary vetting efforts.

Facilities

JWST - James Webb Space Telescope.

Software References

spaceKLIP (J. Kammerer et al. 2022; A. L. Carter et al. 2023; https://spaceklip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html), Winnie (K. Lawson et al. 2022; https://github.com/kdlawson/Winnie), lmfit (M. Newville et al. 2025; https://lmfit.github.io/lmfit-py/), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), iPython (F. Perez & B. E. Granger 2007), Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018), NumPy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020; https://numpy.org), SciPy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020; http://www.scipy.org/).

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Crotts_2025_ApJL_987_L41.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2506.19932 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.17909/19et-s876 (DOI)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NAS 5-03127
National Science Foundation
2139433
H2020 Excellent science
885593
Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-AR-01977.004-A
Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-GO-02327.010-A
Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-AR-03245.004-A
Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-GO-03337.004-A
Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-GO-04050.009-A
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NSSC24K0958
National Science Foundation
DGE 2137420

Dates

Submitted
2025-04-28
Accepted
2025-06-23
Available
2025-07-10
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Astronomy Department , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published