2016ApJ...826..165W

We have carried out two sets of observations to quantify the properties of SiO gas in the unusual HD 172555 debris disk: (1) a search for the J=8-7 rotational transition from the vibrational ground state, carried out with the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) submillimeter telescope and heterodyne receiver at 863 µm and (2) a search at 8.3 µm for the P(17) ro-vibrational transition of gas phase SiO, carried out with the Very Large Telescope (VLT)/VISIR with a resolution, λ/Δλ, of 30,000. The APEX measurement resulted in a 3.3σ detection of an interstellar feature, but only an upper limit to emission at the radial velocity and line width expected from HD 172555. The VLT/VISIR result was also an upper limit. These were used to provide limits for the abundance of gas phase SiO for a range of temperatures. The upper limit from our APEX detection, assuming an 8000 K primary star photospheric excitation, falls more than an order of magnitude below the self-shielding stability threshold derived by Johnson et al. (2012). Our results thus favor a solid-state origin for the 8.3 µm feature seen in the Spitzer IRS spectrum of the circumstellar excess emission and the production of circumstellar O i and Si i by SiO UV photolysis. The implications of these estimates are explored in the framework of models of the HD 172555 circumstellar disk.