It is now well established that FGK post-AGB stars that are surrounded by both hot and cold dust (as derived from the spectral energy distribution), are almost always part of a binary system with 100<Porb<5000~days. The properties and long-term stability of the dust emission requires it to arise from a gas- and dust-rich, puffed-up and (semi-)stable circumbinary disk. This interpretation has been confirmed with spatially resolved observations at a range of wavelengths for various individual objects. Here I present the first results of the first mid-IR interferometric survey of this class of objects. Our sample comprises 18 sources, most of which are confirmed binaries and which cover a range in IR excess. Our analysis clearly shows the compactness of the dust structures in these systems. We perform a statistical comparison with radiative transfer disk models, showing that most objects are indeed continuous disks from the sublimation radius outwards.
@article{arxiv.1508.04309,
title = {An N band interferometric survey of the disks around post-AGB binary stars},
author = {Michel Hillen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04309},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
To appear in the proceedings of "Physics of evolved stars 2015 - A conference dedicated to the memory of Olivier Chesneau" (http://poe2015.sciencesconf.org/)