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Published March 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Structure of Herbig AeBe disks at the milliarcsecond scale: A statistical survey in the H band using PIONIER-VLTI

Abstract

Context. It is now generally accepted that the near-infrared excess of Herbig AeBe stars originates in the dust of a circumstellar disk. Aims. The aims of this article are to infer the radial and vertical structure of these disks at scales of order 1 au, and the properties of the dust grains. Methods. The program objects (51 in total) were observed with the H-band (1.6 μm) PIONIER/VLTI interferometer. The largest baselines allowed us to resolve (at least partially) structures of a few tenths of an au at typical distances of a few hundred parsecs. Dedicated UBVRIJHK photometric measurements were also obtained. Spectral and 2D geometrical parameters are extracted via fits of a few simple models: ellipsoids and broadened rings with azimuthal modulation. Model bias is mitigated by parallel fits of physical disk models. Sample statistics were evaluated against similar statistics for the physical disk models to infer properties of the sample objects as a group. Results. We find that dust at the inner rim of the disk has a sublimation temperature T_(sub) ≈ 1800 K. A ring morphology is confirmed for approximately half the resolved objects; these rings are wide δr/r ≥ 0.5. A wide ring favors a rim that, on the star-facing side, looks more like a knife edge than a doughnut. The data are also compatible with the combination of a narrow ring and an inner disk of unspecified nature inside the dust sublimation radius. The disk inner part has a thickness z/r ≈ 0.2, flaring to z/r ≈ 0.5 in the outer part. We confirm the known luminosity-radius relation; a simple physical model is consistent with both the mean luminosity-radius relation and the ring relative width; however, a significant spread around the mean relation is present. In some of the objects we find a halo component, fully resolved at the shortest interferometer spacing, that is related to the HAeBe class.

Additional Information

© 2017 ESO. Received: 13 July 2016. Accepted: 4 November 2016. Based on observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under programme ID 190.C-0963. Generous time allocations by SAAO are gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful to Francois Van Wyk for diligently carrying out the infrared part of the photometry at Sutherland. J.K. acknowledges support from a Marie Sklodowska-Curie CIG grant (Ref. 618910, PI: Stefan Kraus). J.D.M. and F.B. acknowledge support from NSF-AST 1210972. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of: the Jean-Marie Mariotti Center Aspro2 and SearchCal services6; the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France; and data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia).

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Published - aa29305-16.pdf

Submitted - 1611.08428.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 25, 2023