The disk around CoKu Tauri/4: circumbinary, not transitional

Creators: Ireland, M. J.; Kraus, A. L.

Abstract

CoKu Tau/4 has been labeled as one of the very few known transition disk objects—disks around young stars that have their inner disks cleared of dust, arguably as a result of planetary formation. We report aperture-masking interferometry and adaptive optics imaging observations showing that CoKu Tau/4 is in fact a near-equal binary star of projected separation ~53 mas (~8 AU). The spectral energy distribution of the disk is then naturally explained by the inner truncation of the disk through gravitational interactions with the binary star system. We discuss the possibility that such "unseen" binary companions could cause other circumbinary disks to be labeled as transitional.

Additional Information

© 2008 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2008 January 5; accepted 2008 March 20; published 2008 April 10. We gratefully acknowledge helpful discussions with Lynne Hillenbrand, Klaus Pontoppidan, Geoffrey Blake, Gregory Herczeg, and Colette Salyk and acknowledge the assistance of Thierry Forveille in pointing out an oversight in an early version of the manuscript. M. J. I. would like to acknowledge Michelson Fellowship support from the Michelson Science Center and the NASA Navigator Program. A. L. K. is supported by a NASA/Origins grant to L. Hillenbrand. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.

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