SCUBA Observations of Dust around Lindroos Stars: Evidence for a Substantial Submillimetre Disc Population

Abstract

We have observed 22 Lindroos stars with SCUBA on the JCMT to search for evidence of dust discs. Stars in this sample are the less massive companions of B-type primaries and have ages of 10-170Myr. Dust was detected around three of these stars (HD74067, HD112412 and HD99803B). The emission around HD74067 is centrally peaked and is approximately symmetrically distributed out to ~70". This emission either arises from a two component disc, one circumstellar and the other circumbinary with dust masses of 0.3 and >27Mearth respectively, or an unrelated background object. The other two detections we attribute to circumsecondary discs with masses of 0.04 and 0.3Mearth; a circumprimary disc is also present around HD112413 with a similar mass to that around the companion HD112412. Cross-correlation of our sample with the IRAS catalogs only showed evidence for dust emission at 25um and 60um toward one star (HD1438); none of the sub-mm detections were evident in the far-IR data implying that these discs are cold (<40K assuming beta=1). Our sub-mm detections are some of the first of dust discs surrounding evolved stars that were not detected by IRAS or ISO and imply that 9-14% of stars could harbour previously undetected dust discs that await discovery in unbiased sub-mm surveys. If these discs are protoplanetary remnants, rather than secondary debris discs, dust lifetime arguments show that they must be devoid of small <0.1mm grains. Thus it may be possible to determine the origin of these discs from their spectral energy distributions. The low dust masses for this sample support the picture that protoplanetary dust discs are depleted to the levels of the brightest debris discs (~1Mearth) within 10Myr.