A search for evolved dust in Herbig Ae stars

¹ Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, INAF, Largo E.Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy
² IRAM, 300 rue de la Piscine, 38406 St Martin d'Heres, France
³ National Radio Astronomy Observatory, PO Box O, Socorro, NM 87801, USA
⁴ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

Corresponding author: A. Natta, natta@arcetri.astro.it

Received: 3 November 2003
Accepted: 24 November 2003

Abstract

We present observations of six isolated, pre-main-sequence, intermediate mass stars selected for shallow spectra at submillimeter wavelengths at 1.3, 2.6, 7.0, and 36 millimeters from the IRAM PdBI and the VLA. We analyze the new observations of these stars (HD 34282, HD 35187, HD 142666, HD 143006, HD 150193, HD 163296) together with similar observations of three additional stars from the literature (CQ Tau, UX Ori, TW Hya), in the context of self-consistent irradiated disk models. Our aim is to constrain the wavelength dependence of the dust opacity and the total dust mass in the disks. The shallow wavelength dependence of the opacity is confirmed and for a few stars extended to significantly longer wavelengths. For any plausible dust properties, this requires grain growth from interstellar sizes to maximum sizes of at least a few millimeters, and very likely to several centimeters or more. For four of the stars (HD 34282, HD 163296, CQ Tau, TW Hya), the millimeter emission has been spatially resolved, and the large disk radii (>100 AU) rule out that high optical depths play a role. The mass of dust that has been processed into large grains is substantial, and in some cases implies a disk mass comparable to the mass of the central star.