Resolving the Sub-AU-scale Gas and Dust Distribution in FU Orionis Sources
- Creators
- Eisner, J. A.
- Hillenbrand, L. A.
Abstract
We present Keck Interferometer observations of the three prototypical FU Orionis stars, FU Ori, V1057 Cyg, and V1515 Cyg. With a spatial resolution of a few milliarcseconds and a spectral resolution of λ/Δλ = 2000, our near-infrared observations spatially resolve gas and dust emission extending from stellocentric radii of ~0.05 AU to several AU. We fit these data with accretion disk models where each stellocentric radius of the disk is represented by a supergiant-type stellar emission spectrum at the disk temperature. A disk model is consistent with the data for FU Ori, although we require some local asymmetry in the disk. For V1057 Cyg the disk model does not fit our data well, especially compared to the fit quality achieved for FU Ori. We speculate that a disk wind may be contributing substantially to the observed near-IR emission in this source. The data for V1515 Cyg are noisier than the data obtained for the other two objects and do not strongly constrain the validity of an accretion disk model.
Additional Information
© 2011 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 April 25; accepted 2011 June 1; published 2011 August 9. Data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, from telescope time allocated to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the agency's scientific partnership with the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the 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. The ASTRA program, which enabled the observations presented here, was made possible by funding from the NSF MRI grant AST-0619965. The Keck Interferometer is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as part of its Exoplanet Exploration program. This work has used software from NExSci at the California Institute of Technology. We are grateful to the ASTRA team for their support of the new instrumental mode used here and for their enthusiasm for the science enabled. We also thank R. Akeson, A. Ghez, R. Millan-Gabet, J. Monnier, and J.-U. Pott for useful comments on the manuscript.Attached Files
Published - Eisner2011p15686Astrophys_J.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 25260
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110908-130217253
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- AST-0619965
- NSF MRI
- NASA
- Created
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2011-09-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field