The illusive disk around TWA 7: the ALMA view of the submillimeter counterpart

2018 
Debris disks can be seen as the left-overs of giant planet formation and the possible nurseries of rocky planets. While M-type stars out-number more massive stars we know very little about the time evolution of their circumstellar disks at ages older than $\sim 10$\,Myr. Sub-millimeter observations are best to provide first order estimates of the available mass reservoir and thus better constrain the evolution of such disks. Here, we present ALMA Cycle\,3 observations of the debris disk around the M2 star TWA\,7, which had been postulated to harbor two spatially separated dust belts, based on unresolved far-infrared and sub-millimeter data. We show that most of the emission at wavelengths longer than $160$\,$\mu$m is in fact arising from a contaminant source, most likely a sub-mm galaxy, located at about 6.6 arcsec East of TWA\,7 (in the 2016 data).
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