No Arabic abstract
New data from the Herschel Space Observatory are broadening our understanding of the physics and evolution of the outer regions of protoplanetary disks in star forming regions. In particular they prove to be useful to identify transitional disk candidates. The goals of this work are to complement the detections of disks and the identification of transitional disk candidates in the Lupus clouds with data from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey. We extracted photometry at 70, 100, 160, 250, 350 and 500 $mu$m of all spectroscopically confirmed Class II members previously identified in the Lupus regions and analyzed their updated spectral energy distributions. We have detected 34 young disks in Lupus in at least one Herschel band, from an initial sample of 123 known members in the observed fields. Using the criteria defined in Ribas et al. (2013) we have identified five transitional disk candidates in the region. Three of them are new to the literature. Their PACS-70 $mu$m fluxes are systematically higher than those of normal T Tauri stars in the same associations, as already found in T Cha and in the transitional disks in the Chamaeleon molecular cloud. Herschel efficiently complements mid-infrared surveys for identifying transitional disk candidates and confirms that these objects seem to have substantially different outer disks than the T Tauri stars in the same molecular clouds.
Transitional disks are circumstellar disks with inner holes that in some cases are produced by planets and/or substellar companions in these systems. For this reason, these disks are extremely important for the study of planetary system formation. The Herschel Space Observatory provides an unique opportunity for studying the outer regions of protoplanetary disks. In this work we update previous knowledge on the transitional disks in the Chamaeleon I and II regions with data from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey. We propose a new method for transitional disk classification based on the WISE 12 micron-PACS 70 micron color, together with inspection of the Herschel images. We applied this method to the population of Class II sources in the Chamaeleon region and studied the spectral energy distributions of the transitional disks in the sample. We also built the median spectral energy distribution of Class II objects in these regions for comparison with transitional disks. The proposed method allows a clear separation of the known transitional disks from the Class II sources. We find 6 transitional disks, all previously known, and identify 5 objects previously thought to be transitional as possibly non-transitional. We find higher fluxes at the PACS wavelengths in the sample of transitional disks than those of Class II objects. We show the Herschel 70 micron band to be an efficient tool for transitional disk identification. The sensitivity and spatial resolution of Herschel reveals a significant contamination level among the previously identified transitional disk candidates for the two regions, which calls for a revision of previous samples of transitional disks in other regions. The systematic excess found at the PACS bands could be a result of the mechanism that produces the transitional phase, or an indication of different evolutionary paths for transitional disks and Class II sources.
Transitional disks are protoplanetary disks with opacity gaps/cavities in their dust distribution, a feature that may be linked to planet formation. We perform Bayesian modeling of the three transitional disks SZ Cha, CS Cha and T25 including photometry from the Herschel Space Observatory to quantify the improvements added by these new data. We find disk dust masses between 2x10^-5 and 4x10^-4 Msun, and gap radii in the range of 7-18 AU, with uncertainties of ~ one order of magnitude and ~ 4 AU, respectively. Our results show that adding Herschel data can significantly improve these estimates with respect to mid-infrared data alone, which have roughly twice as large uncertainties on both disk mass and gap radius. We also find weak evidence for different density profiles with respect to full disks. These results open exciting new possibilities to study the distribution of disk masses for large samples of disks.
Context. Observations of nearby star-forming regions with the Herschel Space Observatory complement our view of the protoplanetary disks in Ophiuchus with information about the outer disks. Aims. The main goal of this project is to provide new far-infrared fluxes for the known disks in the core region of Ophiuchus and to identify potential transitional disks using data from Herschel. Methods. We obtained PACS and SPIRE photometry of previously spectroscopically confirmed young stellar objects (YSO) in the region and analysed their spectral energy distributions. Results. From an initial sample of 261 objects with spectral types in Ophiuchus, we detect 49 disks in at least one Herschel band. We provide new far-infrared fluxes for these objects. One of them is clearly a new transitional disk candidate. Conclusions. The data from Herschel Space Observatory provides fluxes that complement previous infrared data and that we use to identify a new transitional disk candidate.
Blazars are a highly-variable, radio-loud subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGN). In order to better understand such objects we must be able to easily identify candidate blazars from the growing population of unidentified sources. Working towards this goal we attempt to identify new gamma-ray blazar candidates from a sample of 102 previously unidentified sources. These sources are selected from Astronomers Telegrams and the literature on the basis of non-periodic variability and multi-wavelength behavior. We then attempt to associate these objects to an IR counterpart in the WISE all-sky survey. We are able to identify sixteen candidate sources whose IR colors are consistent with those of the blazar population. Of those sixteen, thirteen sources have IR colors indicative of being gamma-ray emitting blazar candidates. These sources all possess archival multi-wavelength observations that support their blazar-like nature.
We present the results of a study of the stellar and accretion properties of the (almost) complete sample of class II and transitional YSOs in the Lupus I, II, III and IV clouds, based on spectroscopic data acquired with the VLT/X-Shooter spectrograph. Our study combines the dataset from our previous work with new observations of 55 additional objects. We have investigated 92 YSO candidates in total, 11 of which have been definitely identified with giant stars unrelated to Lupus. The stellar and accretion properties of the 81 bona fide YSOs, which represent more than 90% of the whole class~II and transition disc YSO population in the aforementioned Lupus clouds, have been homogeneously and self-consistently derived, allowing for an unbiased study of accretion and its relationship with stellar parameters. The accretion luminosity, Lacc, increases with the stellar luminosity, Lstar, with an overall slope of ~1.6, similar but with a smaller scatter than in previous studies. There is a significant lack of strong accretors below Lstar~0.1Lsun, where Lacc is always lower than 0.01Lstar. We argue that the Lacc-Lstar slope is not due to observational biases, but is a true property of the Lupus YSOs. The logMacc-logMstar correlation shows a statistically significant evidence of a break, with a steeper relation for Mstar<0.2Msun and a flatter slope for higher masses. The bimodality of the Macc-Mstar relation is confirmed with four different evolutionary models used to derive the stellar mass. The bimodal behaviour of the observed relationship supports the importance of modelling self-gravity in the early evolution of the more massive discs, but other processes, such as photo evaporation and planet formation during the YSOs lifetime, may also lead to disc dispersal on different timescales depending on the stellar mass. We also refined the empirical Lacc vs. Lline relationships.