CURVED WALLS: GRAIN GROWTH, SETTLING, AND COMPOSITION PATTERNS IN T TAURI DISK DUST SUBLIMATION FRONTS
- Department of Astronomy, The University of Michigan, 500 Church Street, 830 Dennison Building., Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (United States)
- Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 58089 Morelia, Michoacán (Mexico)
- Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
- Center for Imaging Science and Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics, Rochester Institute of Technology, 54 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 (United States)
The dust sublimation walls of disks around T Tauri stars represent a directly observable cross-section through the disk atmosphere and midplane. Their emission properties can probe the grain size distribution and composition of the innermost regions of the disk, where terrestrial planets form. Here we calculate the inner dust sublimation wall properties for four classical T Tauri stars with a narrow range of spectral types and inclination angles and a wide range of mass accretion rates to determine the extent to which the walls are radially curved. Best fits to the near- and mid-IR excesses are found for curved, two-layer walls in which the lower layer contains larger, hotter, amorphous pyroxene grains with Mg/(Mg+Fe) = 0.6 and the upper layer contains submicron, cooler, mixed amorphous olivine and forsterite grains. As the mass accretion rates decrease from 10{sup –8} to 10{sup –10} M{sub ☉} yr{sup –1}, the maximum grain size in the lower layer decreases from ∼3 to 0.5 μm. We attribute this to a decrease in fragmentation and turbulent support for micron-sized grains with decreasing viscous heating. The atmosphere of these disks is depleted of dust with dust-gas mass ratios 1 × 10{sup –4} of the interstellar medium (ISM) value, while the midplane is enhanced to eight times the ISM value. For all accretion rates, the wall contributes at least half of the flux in the optically thin 10 μm silicate feature. Finally, we find evidence for an iron gradient in the disk, suggestive of that found in our solar system.
- OSTI ID:
- 22270854
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 775, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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