IR excesses around nearby Lambda Boo stars are caused by debris discs rather than ISM bow waves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lambda Boo stars are predominately A-type stars with solar abundant C, N, O, and S, but up to 2 dex underabundances of refractory elements. The stars’ unusual surface abundances could be due to a selective accretion of volatile gas over dust. It has been proposed that there is a correlation between the Lambda Boo phenomenon and IR excesses which are the result of a debris disc or interstellar medium (ISM) interaction providing the accreting material. We observe 70 or 100 and 160-μm excess emission around nine confirmed Lambda Boo stars with the Herschel Space Observatory, to differentiate whether the dust emission is from a debris disc or an ISM bow wave. We find that 3/9 stars observed host well-resolved debris discs. While the remaining 6/9 are not resolved; they are inconsistent with an ISM bow wave based on the dust emission being more compact for its temperature and predicted bow-wave models produce hotter emission than what is observed. We find the incidence of bright IR excesses around Lambda Boo stars is higher than normal A-stars. To explain this, given our observations, we explore Poynting–Robertson drag as a mechanism of accretion from a debris disc but find it insufficient. As an alternative, we propose the correlation is due to higher dynamical activity in the discs currently underway. Large impacts of planetesimals or a higher influx of comets could provide enough volatile gas for accretion. Further study on the transport of circumstellar material in relation to the abundance anomalies are required to explain the phenomenon through external accretion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".