A&A 464, 55-58 (2007)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20065719
AMBER: Instrument description and first astrophysical results
E. Tatulli1 - A. Isella1,13 - A. Natta1 - L. Testi1 - A. Marconi1 - F. Malbet2 - P. Stee3 - R.G. Petrov4 - F. Millour2,4 - A. Chelli2 - G. Duvert2 - P. Antonelli3 - U. Beckmann5 - Y. Bresson3 - M. Dugué3 - S. Gennari1 - L. Glück2 - P. Kern2 - S. Lagarde3 - E. Le Coarer2 - F. Lisi1 - K. Perraut2 - P. Puget2 - F. Rantakyrö6 - S. Robbe-Dubois4 - A. Roussel3 - G. Weigelt5 - G. Zins2 - M. Accardo1 - B. Acke2,14 - K. Agabi4 - E. Altariba2 - B. Arezki2 - E. Aristidi4 - C. Baffa1 - J. Behrend5 - T. Blöcker5 - S. Bonhomme3 - S. Busoni1 - F. Cassaing7 - J.-M. Clausse3 - J. Colin3 - C. Connot5 - A. Delboulbé2 - A. Domiciano de Souza4,3 - T. Driebe5 - P. Feautrier2 - D. Ferruzzi1 - T. Forveille2 - E. Fossat4 - R. Foy8 - D. Fraix-Burnet2 - A. Gallardo2 - E. Giani1 - C. Gil2,15 - A. Glentzlin3 - M. Heiden5 - M. Heininger5 - O. Hernandez Utrera2 - K.-H. Hofmann5 - D. Kamm3 - M. Kiekebusch6 - S. Kraus5 - D. Le Contel3 - J.-M. Le Contel3 - T. Lesourd9 - B. Lopez3 - M. Lopez9 - Y. Magnard2 - G. Mars3 - G. Martinot-Lagarde9,3 - P. Mathias3 - P. Mège2 - J.-L. Monin2 - D. Mouillet2,16 - D. Mourard3 - E. Nussbaum5 - K. Ohnaka5 - J. Pacheco3 - C. Perrier2 - Y. Rabbia3 - S. Rebattu3 - F. Reynaud10 - A. Richichi11 - A. Robini4 - M. Sacchettini2 - D. Schertl5 - M. Schöller6 - W. Solscheid5 - A. Spang3 - P. Stefanini1 - M. Tallon8 - I. Tallon-Bosc8 - D. Tasso3 - F. Vakili4 - O. von der Lühe12 - J.-C. Valtier3 - M. Vannier4,6,17 - N. Ventura2
1 -
INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Istituto Nazionale di
Astrofisica, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy
2 - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble, UMR 5571 Université Joseph
Fourier/CNRS, BP 53, 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France
3 - Laboratoire Gemini, UMR 6203 Observatoire de la Côte
d'Azur/CNRS, BP 4229, 06304 Nice Cedex 4, France
4 - Laboratoire Universitaire d'Astrophysique de Nice, UMR 6525
Université de Nice - Sophia Antipolis/CNRS, Parc Valrose, 06108
Nice Cedex 2, France
5 - Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hügel 69,
53121 Bonn, Germany
6 - European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19,
Chile
7 - ONERA/DOTA, 29 av de la Division Leclerc, BP 72, 92322
Chatillon cedex, France
8 - Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon, UMR 5574 Université
Claude Bernard/CNRS, 9 avenue Charles André, 69561 Saint Genis
Laval Cedex, France
9 - Division Technique INSU/CNRS UPS 855, 1 place Aristide
Briand, 92195 Meudon Cedex, France
10 - IRCOM, UMR 6615 Université de Limoges/CNRS, 123 avenue Albert
Thomas, 87060 Limoges Cedex, France
11 - European Southern Observatory, Karl Schwarzschild Strasse 2,
85748 Garching, Germany
12 - Kiepenheuer Institut für Sonnenphysik, Schöneckstr. 6,
79104 Freiburg, Germany
13 - Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via
Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy
14 - Instituut voor Sterrenkunde, KU-Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200D,
3001 Leuven, Belgium
15 - Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, Rua
das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto, Portugal
16 - Laboratoire Astrophysique de Toulouse, UMR 5572 Université
Paul Sabatier/CNRS, BP 826, 65008 Tarbes Cedex, France
17 - Departamento de Astronomia, Universidad de Chile, Chile
Received 29 May 2006 / Accepted 26 June 2006
Abstract
Aims. We investigate the origin of the
emission of the Herbig Ae star HD 104237 on Astronomical Unit (AU) scales.
Methods. Using AMBER/VLTI at a spectral resolution
we spatially resolve the emission in both the
line and the adjacent continuum.
Results. The visibility does not vary between the continuum and the
line, even though the line is strongly detected in the spectrum, with a peak intensity 35% above the continuum. This demonstrates that the line and continuum emission have similar size scales. We assume that the K-band continuum excess originates in a "puffed-up'' inner rim of the circumstellar disk, and discuss the likely origin of
.
Conclusions. We conclude that this emission most likely arises from a compact disk wind, launched from a region 0.2-0.5 AU from the star, with a spatial extent similar to that of the near infrared continuum emission region, i.e., very close to the inner rim location.
Key words: stars: individual: HD 104237 - stars: pre-main sequence - technique: interferometric
The spectra of pre-main sequence stars of all masses show prominent strong and broad emission lines of both hydrogen and metals. These lines trace the complex circumstellar environment that characterizes this evolutionary phase, and are very likely powered by the associated accretion disks. The emission lines are used to infer the physical properties of the gas, and to constrain its geometry and dynamics. Their exact origin, however, is not known. The hydrogen lines, in particular, may originate either in the gas that accretes onto the star from the disk, as in magnetospheric accretion models (Hartmann et al. 1994), or in winds and jets, driven by the interaction of the accreting disk with a stellar (Shu et al. 1994) or disk (Casse & Ferreira 2000) magnetic field. For Herbig Ae stars, it is additionally possible that they form in the inner disk (Tambovtseva et al. 1999).
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Figure 1:
Left: SED predicted by the "puffed-up''
rim model used to normalise the K-band continuum visibility. The
contributions of the A star (long-dashed line), the K3 star (dotted line) and the rim (short dashed line) are shown (see the text for the stellar parameters). The observations are from 2MASS
(filled circles), Hipparcos (filled squares), and Malfait et al. (1998) (empty
circles). An extinction of
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For all models, emission in the hydrogen lines is predicted to occur
over very small spatial scales, a few AUs at most. To understand the
physical processes that occur at these scales, one needs to combine
very high spatial resolution with enough spectral resolution to resolve
the line profile. AMBER, the three-beam near-IR recombiner of the VLTI
(Petrov et al. 2007), simultaneously offers high spatial and high spectral
resolution, with the sensitivity required to observe pre-main sequence
stars. These capabilities were recently demonstrated by Malbet et al. (2007),
who succesfully resolved the luminous Herbig Be system MWC297 in both the
continuum and the
line. They showed that the line
emission originates from an extended wind, while the continuum infrared
excess traces a dusty accretion disk.
In this Paper we concentrate on a lower mass, less active system, the
Herbig Ae system HD 104237. The central emission line star, of
spectral type between A4V and A8, is surrounded by a circumstellar disk, which causes the infrared excess emission (Meeus et al. 2001) and drives a jet seen in Ly- images
(Grady et al. 2004). The optical spectrum shows a rather narrow H
emission with a P-Cygni profile (Feigelson et al. 2003). The disk is seen
almost pole-on (
;
Grady et al. 2004), consistent with the low value of
(12 km s-1; Donati et al. 1997). Donati et al. (1997)
detected a stellar magnetic field of 50 G. Böhm et al. (2004) have
revealed the presence of a very close companion of spectral type K3, orbiting with a period of
20 days, and whose bolometric luminosity is 10 times fainter than the one of the central star. In the near infrared domain, spatially unresolved ISAAC observations (Garcia Lopez et al. 2006) show a strong
emission line, with a peak flux
35% above the continuum.
AMBER observed HD 104237 on 26 February 2004 on the UT2-UT3 baseline of
the VLTI, which corresponds to a projected length of
.
The instrument was set up to cover the
spectral range with a spectral resolution of
,
which resolved the profile of the
emission line at
.
The data consist of 10 exposures of 500 frames,
with an integration time of
for each frame. The integration
time is a trade-off between gathering enough flux in the photometric channel
and preventing excessive contrast loss due to fringe motion during the
integration. At the time of these early observations the star magnitude of
K=4.6 was close to the sensitivity limit of the medium spectral resolution
mode, and as a result fringes are only visible in
of the
frames. In the photometric channels the
line
is under the noise level of the indivual frames, but it is well detected when averaging them and it contributes
of the total flux
(Fig. 1, central panel). For comparison we overlay
a higher spectral resolution spectrum (
,
taken with
ISAAC approximately one year before the VLTI observations), as well as
its smoothing to the AMBER spectral resolution. The two spectra are
consistent with each other, within the combined typical line variability
of Herbig Ae stars and calibration uncertainties.
Data reduction followed standard AMBER procedures (Tatulli et al. 2007). To optimize the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the visibility derived from these relatively poor-quality data, we pre-selected frames with individual SNR greater than 1.5, ensuring that fringes are present in all short exposures that enter the visibility.
For these observations the visibility amplitude could not be calibrated
to an absolute scale using an astronomical calibrator (unresolved star),
due to non-stationary vibrations in the optical train of the UT telescopes.
With a 100 ms integration time these vibrations randomly degrade the
fringe contrast of the individual frames by a large factor, and the statistics
of that attenuation depends on uncontrolled factors (exact telescope
and delay line pointing, recent environmental history, etc.) that do not
similarly affect the target star and its calibrator. Fortunately the
contrast loss from vibrations is achromatic across our small relative
bandpass, and as a consequence the differential visibility, that is, the relative visibility between the spectral channels, is unaffected. Our dataset therefore allows us to
investigate the visibility across the
emission
line compared to that in the adjacent continuum. The differential
visibilities are accurate to approximately 5%.
The excess near infrared continuum emission in Herbig Ae stars most
likely originates in the innermost regions of their dusty circumstellar
disks, at the dust sublimation radius (Eisner et al. 2005; Isella et al. 2006). To
approximately normalise the visibilities, we thus scaled the
observed continuum value to the predictions of appropriate theoretical
models of the disk inner rim emission (Isella & Natta 2005). We computed the
structure of the "puffed-up'' inner rim as described in
Isella et al. (2006). We used for the two stars the following parameters:
,
for the primary and
,
for the secondary star. We adopted a distance of
,
and a disk mass surface density of
103
r-3/2g/cm2 (with r in AU).
Figure 1 (left) shows that the model using micron size
astronomical silicates produces a very good fit of the SED. The star
fluxes contribute approximately
(respectively
and
for the primary and secondary star, which gives a binary flux ratio of
0.5 in the K band) of the total
flux, and the inner rim appears as a bright ring with radius
(
at
).
The resulting model visibility on the 35 m baseline is V=0.38
(Fig. 1, right). Note that the orbital period
of the spectroscopic binary is 20 days. This leads to an average
separation of
which corresponds to an angular separation of
.
The central system (A star + K3 companion) is therefore completely unresolved on the current baseline, and both stars are located inside the dust evaporation radius.
Within the fairly small error bars, the visibility does not
change across the
emission line. This result
is robust and puts strong constraints on the relative spatial
extent of the line and continuum emission regions, demonstrating
that they have very similar apparent sizes. We use this constraint
to probe the processes responsible for the the
emission in this star, and consider in turn the three main mechanisms usually invoked to interpret the hydrogen line emission
in pre-main-sequence stars. We translate each mechanism to simple
geometrical models of specific spatial extension, with the line
strength fixed at the observational value, and evaluate the resulting
visibility across the line
.
Magnetospheric accretion: in such a model matter infalls
on the star along magnetic field lines, and the base of this infalling
flow is (approximately) inside the corotation radius (Muzerolle et al. 2004).
For HD 104237 we find
,
using
Donati et al. (1997) and an inclination of
(Grady et al. 2004). Note that this value is, at our spatial resolution level, similar to the separation of the binary. Adopting
and
as the inner and outer limits of the magnetospheric accreting region, Fig. 2 (upper panel)
demonstrates that
emission is then confined much
closer to the star than the dusty rim. The predicted visibility
therefore increases significantly in the line, contrary to the observational
result. Explaining the observed visibility with magnetospheric accretion
requires the corotation radius to approach the inner rim, which would
need an unrealistically lower stellar rotational velocity (
). The magnetic field of HD 104237 is
weak, B=50G (Donati et al. 1997), and the corresponding magnetospheric
truncation radius (
,
Shu et al. 1994) is
smaller than the corotation radius. Replacing
by
as the outer radius of the magnetospheric accreting region would thus
only reinforce our conclusion. Magnetospheric accretion therefore cannot
be responsible for most of the
emission.
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Figure 2:
Comparison between the observed visibilities
(empty square with error bars) and the predictions
(solid curves) of the simple geometrical models for the
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Gas in the disk: since HD 104237 accretes matter (a few
,
Grady et al. 2004,
Garcia Lopez et al. 2006), an optically thin gaseous
disk (Muzerolle et al. 2004) must extend inward from the dust evaporation
rim to either the magnetospheric truncation radius or the corotation
radius; this disk region is ionised and may, in principle, emit the
observed
line. To model this scenario, we assume a constant
surface brightness between
(or
)
and
.
The resulting visibilities (Fig. 2, middle
panel) are also inconsistent with the observations, though not quite
as severely.
Outflowing wind: the remaining possibility is that
is emitted in a wind or jet. The bulk of
the emission is then confined to the regions of highest gas density,
i.e., to the base of the wind/jet. Since the wind/jet must be seen
almost pole-on, we assume in our model that emission is confined
to a ring of width
,
with
,
where Ri is the ring inner radius, that is the wind launching point. This
assumption is guided by the wind models of Natta et al. (1988), and by
the more recent simulations of the
emission
in jets of T Tauri stars (Thiébaut et al. 2003). For pole-on outflows
most of the intensity originates in a ring with these approximate
properties. Fixing
and adjusting Ri, this
model reproduces the interferometric data for Ri between
and
(Fig. 2,
bottom panel). Allowing different relative widths (
from
to
of Ri), we find that the
emission has to originate
between
0.2 and 0.5 AU. Our interferometric measurements are
therefore consistent with the
emission coming from
the base of a wind, originating in a disk region close to the location
of the dusty rim. The presence of a wind in HD 104237 is well established
on (much) larger scales, by the
bipolar microjet
(Grady et al. 2004) and by the P-Cygni profile of the
line (Feigelson et al. 2003). Given our oversimplified geometrical models, it
would be inappropriate to speculate too much on the detailed nature of the
wind. We note however that the launching region of an X-wind, driven
by the stellar magnetic field (Shu et al. 1994), is close to the
corotation radius and too small to be consistent with the present
data. Making the X-wind acceptable needs one to relax the assumption that
most of the line emission originates near the launching point, and
instead have the brightest
region a factor 5-8 further away
from the star. The disk-wind scenario in contrast has its launching point a few tenths of an AU from the star and needs no adjusting. This preference
for a disk-wind is consistent with the size of the jet launching regions
inferred from the rotation of T Tauri jets (Coffey et al. 2004).
Our analysis assumes that the continuum originates in a dusty "puffed-up'' ring. That model has been shown to match Herbig Ae and T Tauri stars over a large luminosity range (Monnier et al. 2005), but it obviously needs to be verified for the specific case of HD 104237, by obtaining calibrated interferometric observations over a few baselines.
We have presented interferometric observations of the
Herbig Ae star HD 104237, obtained with the AMBER/VLTI instrument with
high spectral resolution.
The visibility is identical in the
line and in the continuum, even though the line represents
of
the total
flux. This implies that
the line and continuum emission regions have the same apparent size.
Scaling the continuum visibility with a "puffed-up'' inner rim model,
and using simple models to describe the
emission, we have shown that the line emission is unlikely to originate
in either magnetospheric accreting columns of gas or in the gaseous disk. It is much more likely to come from a compact outflowing disk wind
launched in the vicinity of the rim, about 0.5 AU from the star.
This does not preclude accretion from occuring along the
stellar magnetic field detected by Donati et al. (1997), and accreting
matter might even dominate the optical hydrogen line emission, but
our observations show that the bulk of the
emission in HD 104237
is unlikely to originate in magnetospheric accreting matter.
Our results show that AMBER/VLTI is a powerful diagnostic of the origin of the line emission in young stellar objects. Observations of a consistent sample of objects will strongly constrain the wind launching mechanism.
Acknowledgements
This work has been partly supported by the MIUR COFIN grant 2003/027003-001 and 025227/2004 to the INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri. This work is based on observations made with the European Southern Observatory telescopes.The AMBER project
was founded by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) in Bonn, the Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri (OAA) in Firenze, the French Region "Provence Alpes Côte D'Azur" and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The CNRS funding has been made through the Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers (INSU) and its Programmes Nationaux (ASHRA, PNPS, PNP).
The OAA co-authors acknowledge partial support from MIUR grants to the Arcetri Observatory: A LBT interferometric arm, and analysis of VLTI interferometric data and From Stars to Planets: accretion, disk evolution and planet formation and from INAF grants to the Arcetri Observatory Stellar and Extragalactic Astrophysics with Optical Interferometry. C. Gil work was supported in part by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through project POCTI/CTE-AST/55691/2004 from POCTI, with funds from the European program FEDER.
The preparation and interpretation of AMBER observations benefit from the tools developed by the Jean-Marie Mariotti Center for optical interferometry JMMC
and from the databases of the Centre de Données Stellaires (CDS) and of the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).
The data reduction software amdlib is freely available on the AMBER site http://amber.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr. It has been linked to the public domain software Yorick
to provide the user-friendly interface ammyorick.