CO Emission from the Inner Regions of Disks with Dust Clearing

Details CO Emission from the Inner Regions of Disks with Dust Clearing CO Emission from the Inner Regions of Disks with Dust Clearing

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.3009b&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #30.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The inner regions of protoplanetary disks (R<50AU) are likely to be the most active regions of planet formation and thus to hold the key to understanding the formation of solar systems like our own. The two most popular theories of planet formation involve generating planets through gravitational instability (Boss 2003) or via the core-accretion scenario in which cores accrete gas and dust and generate gaps in the disk (Pollack et al. 1996). There is a small sample of disks which, based on their SEDs, appear to have cleared most of the small dust grains out of the inner disk. One obvious question is, what is the state of the gas in the inner region?
CO is a good gas tracer in protoplanetary disks as it is abundant but easier to observe with ground based telescopes than molecular hydrogen. We have used NIRSPEC on Keck II to obtain high resolution spectra (R 25,000, v=12.5 km/s) of the 4.7 micron CO v=1-0 fundamental emission band. Optically thick 12CO emission is seen from the majority of the sample while 13CO is not detected. Thus, we get decent bounds on the CO mass surface density and fairly rigorous lower bounds on the total mass surface density by assuming most of the cosmically available carbon is locked up as CO. With NIRSPEC, the lines are spectrally resolved and the line profiles can be used to locate the gas within the disk. The various line strengths reflect the populations of the different energy rotational levels and provide information about the energy and temperature structure of the gas within the disk as well as an estimate of the alpha viscosity parameter assuming steady state accretion. All this information allows a reconstruction of the inner disk region which can then be compared with the predictions from planetesimal/oligarchic growth models.

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