English

High Precision Dynamical Masses of Pre-Main Sequence Stars with ALMA and Gaia

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-04-10 v1

Abstract

The Keplerian rotation in protoplanetary disks can be used to robustly measure stellar masses at very high precision if the source distance is known. We present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of spatially and spectrally resolved 12^{12}CO (2--1) emission towards the disks around 2MASS J16262774--2527247 (the tertiary companion to ROXs 12 at 5100 au), CT Cha, and DH Tau. We employ detailed modeling of the Keplerian rotation profile, coupled with accurate distances from GaiaGaia, to directly measure the stellar masses with \sim2\% precision. We also compare these direct mass measurements with the masses inferred from evolutionary models, determined in a statistically rigorous way. We find that 2MASS J16262774--2527247 has a mass of 0.5350.007+0.006 M0.535^{+0.006}_{-0.007}~M_{\odot} and CT Cha has a mass of 0.7960.014+0.015 M0.796^{+0.015}_{-0.014}~M_{\odot}, broadly consistent with evolutionary models, although potentially significant differences remain. DH Tau has a mass of 0.1010.003+0.004 M0.101^{+0.004}_{-0.003}~M_{\odot}, but it suffers from strong foreground absorption that may affect our mass estimate. The combination of ALMA, GaiaGaia, and codes like \texttt{pdspy}, presented here, can be used to infer the dynamical masses for large samples of young stars and substellar objects, and place constraints on evolutionary models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.00032,
  title  = {High Precision Dynamical Masses of Pre-Main Sequence Stars with ALMA and Gaia},
  author = {Patrick D. Sheehan and Ya-Lin Wu and Josh A. Eisner and John Tobin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.00032},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

22 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ