Looking for the influence of planets in the HD 115600 debris disk

Band-averaged (0.96–1.34 μm), integral field spectrograph images of the HD 115600 disk. The raw image is presented in the top left. Angular differential imaging and spectral differential imaging reductions are shown in the other three panels with high-pass filtering. The image center is marked by a cross in each image, and noise from the central star is masked to ∼25 au.

Giant exoplanets orbiting within debris disks can sculpt asymmetries into the disk that are potentially more observable than the planets themselves. In my very first lead-author paper in 2019, I used VLT/SPHERE observations of the disk around HD 115600 to measure the offset of the disk from the central star in order to make predictions on the presence of unseen planets. We found a much smaller disk offset than in previous work, suggesting no planets larger than a few Jupiter masses exist around this star.