English

Constraining the properties of transitional disks in Chamaeleon I with Herschel

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2016-02-17 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

Transitional disks are protoplanetary disks with opacity gaps/cavities in their dust distribution, a feature that may be linked to planet formation. We perform Bayesian modeling of the three transitional disks SZ Cha, CS Cha and T25 including photometry from the Herschel Space Observatory to quantify the improvements added by these new data. We find disk dust masses between 2x10^-5 and 4x10^-4 Msun, and gap radii in the range of 7-18 AU, with uncertainties of ~ one order of magnitude and ~ 4 AU, respectively. Our results show that adding Herschel data can significantly improve these estimates with respect to mid-infrared data alone, which have roughly twice as large uncertainties on both disk mass and gap radius. We also find weak evidence for different density profiles with respect to full disks. These results open exciting new possibilities to study the distribution of disk masses for large samples of disks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.03183,
  title  = {Constraining the properties of transitional disks in Chamaeleon I with Herschel},
  author = {Á. Ribas and H. Bouy and B. Merín and G. Duchêne and I. Rebollido and C. Espaillat and C. Pinte},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.03183},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS