The Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems: Grain Growth and Chemical Processing of Dust in T Tauri Systems

By J. Bouwman, Th. Henning, L. Hillenbrand, M. Meyer, Ilaria Pascucci, J. Carpenter, D. Hines, J. Kim, M. Silverstone, D. Hollenbach and 1 more. 2008

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This paper is one in a series presenting results obtained within the Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems (FEPS) Legacy Science Program on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Here we present a study of dust processing and growth in seven protoplanetary disks. Our spectra indicate that the circumstellar silicate dust grains have grown to sizes at least 10 times larger than observed in the interstellar medium and show evidence for a non-negligible (~5% in mass fractions) contribution from crystalline species. These results are similar to those of other studies of protoplanetary disks. In addition, we find a correlation between the strength of the amorphous silicate feature and the shape of the spectral energy distribution. This latter result is consistent with the growth and subsequent gravitational settling of dust grains toward the disk midplane. Furthermore, we find a change in the relative abundance of the different crystalline species: more enstatite than forsterite is observed in the inner warm dust population at ~1 AU, while forsterite dominates in the colder outer regions at ~5-15 AU. This change in the relative abundances argues for a localized crystallization process rather than a radial mixing scenario in which crystalline silicates are being transported outwards from a single formation region in the hot inner parts of the disk. Finally, we report the detection of emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules in five out of seven sources. We find a tentative PAH band at 8.2 μm that was previously undetected in the spectra of disks around low-mass pre-main-sequence stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/46b50c55da42acac9cb63e22f9960d0bdd69e866

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Citations in the corpus

Debris disks as signposts of terrestrial planet formation (2011, background): “Such observations have shown evidence for grain growth in individual protoplanetary disks (Bouwman et al. 2008), and larger samples have shown that hot dust disappears from these disks within a few Myr and that cooler dust takes longer to disappear (Haisch et al. 2001; Mamajek et al. 2004; Meyer et…”
Improved Age Estimation for Solar-Type Dwarfs Using Activity-Rotation Diagnostics (2008, background): “…solar-type stars between ∼3 Myr and ∼3 Gyr (Meyer et al. 2004; Kim et al. 2005; Stauffer et al. 2005; Hines et al. 2006; Meyer et al. 2006; Silverstone et al. 2006; Hines et al. 2007; Moro-Mart́ın et al. 2007; Bouwman et al. 2008; Meyer et al. 2008; Hillenbrand et al. 2008; Carpenter et al. 2009).”
CRYSTALLINE SILICATES AND DUST PROCESSING IN THE PROTOPLANETARY DISKS OF THE TAURUS YOUNG CLUSTER (2007, methodology): “Silicas are not as frequently studied, but are far from unknown (e.g., Honda et al. 2003; Uchida et al. 2004; S06; Bouwman et al. 2008).”
FORMATION AND EVOLUTION OF PLANETARY SYSTEMS: PROPERTIES OF DEBRIS DUST AROUND SOLAR-TYPE STARS (2008, background): “Spectra for 40 of these sources are presented in Figure 7; spectra for 5 sources appear in Bouwman et al. (2008) in a study of optically thick disks in the FEPS sample, and 1RXS J051111.”