Near-Infrared Images of Protoplanetary Disk Surrounding HD 142527

We discovered a unique morphology in a disk around the Herbig Ae star HD 142527 by near-infrared (H and K bands) adaptive optics imaging observations. The almost face-on disk consists of two bright arcs facing one another along the east-west direction (banana-split structure) and one spiral arm extending to the north from the western arc. The eastern arc is located at ~100-400 AU in radius from the star, and the western one is detected at ~150-490 AU. The stellar position is displaced from the center of the disk by about 20 AU to the north, and also from the center of the inner hole. The two arcs show an asymmetry in their size and brightness; the larger western arc is brighter than the east one by about 2 mag. The morphology of the disk, consisting of a banana-split structure and a spiral arm, most likely suggests the presence of an unseen eccentric binary and a recent stellar encounter.

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