The Near-Infrared Size-Luminosity Relations for Herbig Ae/Be Disks

By J. Monnier, R. Millan-Gabet, R. Billmeier, R. Akeson, D. Wallace, J. Berger, N. Calvet, P. D’Alessio, W. Danchi, L. Hartmann and 24 more. 2005

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We report the results of a sensitive K-band survey of Herbig Ae/Be disk sizes using the 85 m baseline Keck Interferometer. Targets were chosen to span the maximum range of stellar properties to probe the disk size dependence on luminosity and effective temperature. For most targets, the measured near-infrared sizes (ranging from 0.2 to 4 AU) support a simple disk model possessing a central optically thin (dust-free) cavity, ringed by hot dust emitting at the expected sublimation temperatures (Ts ~1000-1500 K). Furthermore, we find a tight correlation of disk size with source luminosity R ∝ L1/2 for Ae and late Be systems (valid over more than two decades in luminosity), confirming earlier suggestions based on lower quality data. Interestingly, the inferred dust-free inner cavities of the highest luminosity sources (Herbig B0-B3 stars) are undersized compared to predictions of the "optically thin cavity" model, likely because of optically thick gas within the inner AU.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e31fc2924b311b1e7935cb36201877368a47e1d3

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Citations in the corpus

On the formation of Hα line emission around classical T Tauri stars (2006, methodology): “…applying the hybrid model to the Herbig Ae/Be systems is the growing observational data probing the line formation region and inner disc using techniques such as spectroastrometry (e.g. Baines et al. 2006), spectropolarimetry (e.g. Vink et al. 2005a) and interferometry (e.g. Monnier et al. 2005).”
The Inner Regions of Protoplanetary Disks (2010, methodology): “It might come from accretional energy release in the gas inward of the dust rim (Akeson et al., 2005), or from refractory dust that survives close to the star because it is being “protected” by the gas (Monnier et al., 2005), or even from an inner disk wind/evelope.”
Few Skewed Disks Found in First Closure-Phase Survey of Herbig Ae/Be Stars (2006, background): “…(2001), our ring diameter estimate is much smaller because we did not apply the same visibility “correction” to compensate for the incoherent flux of the companion (our result here is consistent with the recent result using the longer baseline Keck Interferometer at K band; Monnier et al. 2005).”