PANCHROMATIC OBSERVATIONS AND MODELING OF THE HV TAU C EDGE-ON DISK

Journal Article · Sat Mar 20 00:00:00 EDT 2010 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/712/1/112· OSTI ID:21394167

Duchene, G; Maness, H L ^[1]; McCabe, C ^[2]; Pinte, C; Menard, F; Duvert, G ^[3]; Stapelfeldt, K R ^[4]; Ghez, A M ^[5]; Bouy, H ^[6]; Barrado y Navascues, D; Morales-Calderon, M ^[7]; Wolf, S ^[8]; Padgett, D L; Brooke, T Y; Noriega-Crespo, A ^[9]

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1. Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3411 (United States)
2. IPAC, MS 220-6, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
3. Universite Joseph Fourier - Grenoble 1/CNRS, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (LAOG) UMR 5571, BP 53, 38041 Grenoble Cedex 09 (France)
4. JPL, MS 183-900, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099 (United States)
5. Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics, UCLA, Box 951547, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1562 (United States)
6. Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, C/Via Lactea s/n, 38200 - La Laguna, Tenerife (Spain)
7. Laboratorio de Astrofisica Estelar y Exoplanetas (LAEX-CAB, INTA-CSIC), P.O. Box 78, 28691 Villanueva de la Canada (Madrid) (Spain)
8. Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel, Institut fuer Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Leibnizstr. 15, 24098 Kiel (Germany)
9. SSC, MS 220-6, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)

We present new high spatial resolution ({approx}<0.''1) 1-5 {mu}m adaptive optics images, interferometric 1.3 mm continuum and {sup 12}CO 2-1 maps, and 350 {mu}m, 2.8 and 3.3 mm fluxes measurements of the HV Tau system. Our adaptive optics images unambiguously demonstrate that HV Tau AB-C is a common proper motion pair. They further reveal an unusually slow orbital motion within the tight HV Tau AB pair that suggests a highly eccentric orbit and/or a large deprojected physical separation. Scattered light images of the HV Tau C edge-on protoplanetary disk suggest that the anisotropy of the dust scattering phase function is almost independent of wavelength from 0.8 to 5 {mu}m, whereas the dust opacity decreases significantly over the same range. The images further reveal a marked lateral asymmetry in the disk that does not vary over a timescale of two years. We further detect a radial velocity gradient in the disk in our {sup 12}CO map that lies along the same position angle as the elongation of the continuum emission, which is consistent with Keplerian rotation around a 0.5-1 M{sub sun} central star, suggesting that it could be the most massive component in the triple system. To obtain a global representation of the HV Tau C disk, we search for a model that self-consistently reproduces observations of the disk from the visible regime up to millimeter wavelengths. We use a powerful radiative transfer model to compute synthetic disk observations and use a Bayesian inference method to extract constraints on the disk properties. Each individual image, as well as the spectral energy distribution, of HV Tau C can be well reproduced by our models with fully mixed dust provided grain growth has already produced larger-than-interstellar dust grains. However, no single model can satisfactorily simultaneously account for all observations. We suggest that future attempts to model this source include more complex dust properties and possibly vertical stratification. While both grain growth and stratification have already been suggested in many disks, only a panchromatic analysis, such as presented here, can provide a complete picture of the structure of a disk, a necessary step toward quantitatively testing the predictions of numerical models of disk evolution.

• OSTI ID: 21394167
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 712, Issue 1; Other Information: DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/712/1/112; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ANISOTROPY
ASYMMETRY
DUSTS
ELONGATION
ENERGY SPECTRA
GRAIN GROWTH
MAPS
ORBITS
PROPER MOTION
PROTOPLANETS
RADIAL VELOCITY
RADIANT HEAT TRANSFER
ROTATION
SCATTERING
SPATIAL RESOLUTION
STAR EVOLUTION
STARS
STRATIFICATION
WAVELENGTHS
DEFORMATION
ENERGY TRANSFER
EVOLUTION
HEAT TRANSFER
MOTION
RESOLUTION
SPECTRA
VELOCITY