No hot Jupiter around TW Hydrae?

TW Hydrae: evidence of stellar spots instead of a Hot Jupiter

Looks like classical T Tauri stars can support stable starspots which can mimic planets in RV observations. Pity, because if this were a hot Jupiter system it would be a very useful test for migration theories and models which predict terrestrial planet formation in the wake of gas giant migration through the inner system.

Here it comes again...

SPIRou spectropolarimetry of the T Tauri star TW Hydrae: magnetic fields, accretion and planets

Quote :

In this paper we report near-infrared observations of the classical T Tauri star TW Hya with the SPIRou high-resolution spectropolarimeter and velocimeter at the 3.6-m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. By applying Least-Squares Deconvolution (LSD) to our circularly polarized spectra, we derived longitudinal fields that vary from year to year from -200 to +100 G, and exhibit low-level modulation on the 3.6 d rotation period of TW Hya, despite the star being viewed almost pole-on. We then used Zeeman-Doppler Imaging to invert our sets of unpolarized and circularly-polarized LSD profiles into brightness and magnetic maps of TW Hya in all 4 seasons, and obtain that the large-scale field of this T Tauri star mainly consists of a 1.0-1.2 kG dipole tilted at about 20° to the rotation axis, whereas the small-scale field reaches strengths of up to 3-4 kG. We find that the large-scale field is strong enough to allow TW Hya to accrete material from the disc on the polar regions at the stellar surface in a more or less geometrically stable accretion pattern, but not to succeed in spinning down the star. We also report the discovery of a radial velocity signal of semi-amplitude 11.1+3.3−2.6 m/s (detected at 4.3σ at a period of 8.3 d in the spectrum of TW Hya, whose origin may be attributed to either a non-axisymmetric density structure in the inner accretion disc, or to a 0.55+0.17−0.13 Jupiter mass candidate close-in planet (if orbiting in the disc plane), at an orbital distance of 0.075±0.001 au.