CHARA Array Observations of Be Star Disks

Details CHARA Array Observations of Be Star Disks CHARA Array Observations of Be Star Disks

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.6304g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #63.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.853

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The CHARA Array long baseline interferometer is a powerful tool to resolve stars and explore their circumstellar environments. This ability is of key importance in studies of the circumstellar disks surrounding Be stars. Be stars are rotating at a large fraction of their critical rotation rate, and they tend to lose mass and angular momentum into an outflowing disk. The disks are inherently time variable, and they often can attain radii an order of magnitude larger than that of the underlying star. The disk gas is hot and is a source of bound-free and free-free radiation that dominates over the photospheric flux in the infrared. The CHARA Array has now provided us with near-infrared interferometric data on some of the famous, northern sky Be stars, including Gamma Cas, Phi Per, Zeta Tau, Kappa Dra, and Ups Cyg. These initial observations provide visibility measurements as a function of baseline and position angle, and these can be modeled using simple power law representations of the disk density (based upon density near the star, radial density exponent, disk normal inclination, and position angle). The resulting densities are in broad agreement with prior studies of the IR excess flux, and the resulting orientations generally agree with those from interferometric H-alpha and continuum polarimetric observations. All the targets are known binaries with faint companions, and companions appear to influence the interferometric visibilities in the cases of Phi Per and Kappa Dra. In the near future, visibility and phase data will be forthcoming with the MIRC and Vega beam combiners, and these will produce the first images and direct kinematical data for Be disks.
Research at the CHARA Array is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University and by the National Science Foundation through NSF Grants AST 0606958 and AST 0606861.

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