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astro-ph.SR · Solar and Stellar Astrophysicsastro-ph.EP · Earth and Planetary Astrophysicsastro-ph.IM · Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

NEOWISE 2014–2024 shows one sudden >10% 4.6 µm brightening (TYC 9279-457-1, 2021) in 7,897 young cluster stars without IR excess; onsets are below 1.3e-4 per star-year for 2-yr exponential decays

We searched NEOWISE-R photometry from 2014 to 2024 for sudden mid-infrared brightenings of young stars. Such a brightening can show new hot dust from a giant impact. The sample has 8,161 dwarf members (about F0 to M0) of 10–300 Myr clusters within 500 pc (Hunt & Reffert 2023). Of these, 7,897 stars have no AllWISE infrared excess. We made visit light curves and corrected each visit with the median offset of 30 nearby stars. A pair-correlation test shows that this correction removes the systematics that unrelated stars share. The event rule needs a sudden W2 rise in two consecutive visits, with W1 brightening in the same visits. The rule flagged an onset in 5 of the 9 control stars (known variable dusty stars) with usable data. In the stars without excess, only one star brightened suddenly by more than 10% at 4.6 µm. This star is TYC 9279-457-1 (Gaia DR3 5808318474663998464), a G star in UPK 612 (about 120 Myr, 227 pc). Between 2020.64 and 2021.19, its W2 flux increased by 16% and its W1 flux by 8%. The excess then decreased with an e-folding time of 2.9 ± 0.2 yr. It was still present in 2024. The excess has a blackbody temperature of 1220 K (16–84%: 1105–1371 K) and L_d/L* = 0.006. Blackbody grains at this temperature are 0.046 au from the star. The minimum dust mass is about 1.2e16 kg for 1 µm grains. 136 field stars within 12 arcmin did not brighten. The centroid step was −4 ± 9 mas in RA and +3 ± 6 mas in Dec. TESS shows no dip deeper than 0.4% in 2019–2026. The expected number of chance background AGN is 0.01. We think that new hot dust near the star is the best explanation. But we have only one event, a 6-month cadence and no spectrum. Injections into the real light curves give 95% upper limits on the onset rate. For an onset W2 excess A ≥ 0.1 and a 2 yr decay, the limit is 1.3e-4 per star per year. For A ≥ 0.2, the limit is 4.7e-5. Shorter decays give weaker limits, for example 2.3e-2 for A ≥ 0.1 and a 0.25 yr decay. The limits apply only to the injected model: a sudden rise, an exponential decay, a W1 excess of 0.4 times the W2 excess, and a uniform onset time. We count 9 weak candidates with no colour change as events, so the limits are conservative. The package has the code, the visit light curves, the injection tables and the provenance. A script restores the Gaia DR3 columns, because their licence does not allow redistribution under CC BY 4.0.

extreme debris disks · giant impacts · planetesimal collisions · hot dust · NEOWISE · AllWISE · mid-infrared variability · young open clusters · TYC 9279-457-1 · UPK 612 · event rate limits · injection-recovery · WISE systematics · terrestrial planet formation · Gaia DR3 · TESS

Admitted 2 citing publications

References

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