English

Water and OH Emission from the inner disk of a Herbig Ae/Be star

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-02-25 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We report the detection of hot H2_{2}O and OH emission from the Herbig Ae/Be star HD 101412~101412 using the Cryogenic Infrared Echelle Spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope\textit{Very Large Telescope}. Previous studies of Herbig Ae/Be stars have shown the presence of OH around some of these sources, but H2_{2}O has proven more elusive. While marginal water emission has been reported in the mid-infrared, and a few Herbig Ae/Be stars show water emission in the far-infrared, water emission near 2.9 μ\mum has not been previously detected. We apply slab models to the ro-vibrational OH, H2_{2}O, and CO spectra of this source and show that the molecules are consistent with being cospatial. We discuss the possibility that the detection of the CO overtone bandhead emission, detection of water emission, and the large line to continuum contrast of the OH lines may be connected to its high inclination and the λ\lambda Bo\"o nature of this star. If the low abundance of refractories results from the selective accretion of gas relative to dust, the inner disk of HD 101412~101412 should be strongly dust-depleted allowing us to probe deeper columns of molecular gas in the disk, enhancing its molecular emission. Our detection of C- and O-bearing molecules from the inner disk of HD 101412~101412 is consistent with the expected presence in this scenario of abundant volatiles in the accreting gas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.07094,
  title  = {Water and OH Emission from the inner disk of a Herbig Ae/Be star},
  author = {Steven C. Adams and Máté Ádámkovics and John S. Carr and Joan R. Najita and Sean D. Brittain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.07094},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, 12 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables