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Register a new userObserving Carbon & Oxygen Carriers in Protoplanetary Disks at Mid-infrared Wavelengths
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D. E. Anderson
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Infrared observations probe the warm gas in the inner regions of planet-forming disks around young sun-like, T Tauri stars. In these systems, H$_2$O, OH, CO, CO$_2$, C$_2$H$_2$, and HCN have been widely observed. However, the potentially abundant carbon carrier CH$_4$ remains largely unconstrained. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to characterize mid-infrared fluxes of CH$_4$ along with several other carriers of carbon and oxygen. In anticipation of the JWST mission, we model the physical and chemical structure of a T Tauri disk to predict the abundances and mid-infrared fluxes of observable molecules. A range of compositional scenarios are explored involving the destruction of refractory carbon materials and alterations to the total elemental (volatile and refractory) C/O ratio. Photon-driven chemistry in the inner disk surface layers largely destroys the initial carbon and oxygen carriers. This causes models with the same physical structure and C/O ratio to have similar steady state surface compositions, regardless of the initial chemical abundances. Initial disk compositions are better preserved in the shielded inner disk midplane. The degree of similarity between the surface and midplane compositions in the inner disk will depend on the characteristics of vertical mixing at these radii. Our modeled fluxes of observable molecules respond sensitively to changes in the disk gas temperature, inner radius, and the total elemental C/O ratio. As a result, mid-infrared observations of disks will be useful probes of these fundamental disk parameters, including the C/O ratio, which can be compared to values determined for planetary atmospheres.
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We present a Spitzer InfraRed Spectrometer search for 10-36 micron molecular emission from a large sample of protoplanetary disks, including lines from H2O, OH, C2H2, HCN and CO2. This paper describes the sample and data processing and derives the detection rate of mid-infrared molecular emission as a function of stellar mass. The sample covers a range of spectral type from early M to A, and is supplemented by archival spectra of disks around A and B stars. It is drawn from a variety of nearby star forming regions, including Ophiuchus, Lupus and Chamaeleon. In total, we identify 22 T Tauri stars with strong mid-infrared H2O emission. Integrated water line luminosities, where water vapor is detected, range from 5x10^-4 to 9x10^-3 Lsun, likely making water the dominant line coolant of inner disk surfaces in classical T Tauri stars. None of the 5 transitional disks in the sample show detectable gaseous molecular emission with Spitzer upper limits at the 1% level in terms of line-to-continuum ratios (apart from H2). We find a strong dependence on detection rate with spectral type; no disks around our sample of 25 A and B stars were found to exhibit water emission, down to 1-2% line-to-continuum ratios, in the mid-infrared, while almost 2/3 of the disks around K stars show sufficiently intense water emission to be detected by Spitzer. Some Herbig Ae/Be stars show tentative H2O/OH emission features beyond 20 micron at the 1-2 level, however, and one of them shows CO2 in emission. We argue that the observed differences between T Tauri disks and Herbig Ae/Be disks is due to a difference in excitation and/or chemistry depending on spectral type and suggest that photochemistry may be playing an important role in the observable characteristics of mid-infrared molecular line emission from protoplanetary disks.
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Mid-IR water lines from protoplanetary disks around T Tauri stars have a detection rate of 50%. Models have identified multiple physical properties of disks such as dust-to-gas mass ratio, dust size power law distribution, disk gas mass, disk inner radius, and disk scale height as potential explanation for the current detection rate. We search for a connection between mid-IR water line fluxes and the strength of the 10~$mu$m silicate feature. We analyse observed water line fluxes from three blends and compute the 10~$mu$m silicate feature strength from Spitzer spectra. We use a series of published models, exploring disk dust and gas properties, and the effects of different stars. The models also show that the increasing stellar luminosity enhance simultaneously the strength of this dust feature and the water lines fluxes. No correlation is found between the observed mid-IR water lines and the 10~$mu$m silicate. Our sample shows the same difference in the peak strength between amorphous and crystalline silicates that was noted in earlier studies, but our models do not support this intrinsic difference in silicate peak strength. Individual properties of our model series are not able to reproduce the most extreme observations, suggesting that more complex dust properties are required. A parametrized settling prescription is able to boost the peak strength by a factor 2 for the standard model. Water line fluxes are unrelated to the composition of the dust. The pronounced regular trends seen in the model results are washed out in the data due to the larger diversity in stellar and disk properties compared to our model series. The disks with with weaker mid-IR water line fluxes are depleted in gas or enhanced in dust in the inner 10~au. In the case of gas depleted disks, settling produces very strong 10~$mu$m silicate features, with strong peak strength.
We present the largest survey of spectrally resolved mid-infrared water emission to date, with spectra for 11 disks obtained with the Michelle and TEXES spectrographs on Gemini North. Water emission is detected in 6 of 8 disks around classical T Tauri stars. Water emission is not detected in the transitional disks SR 24 N and SR 24 S, in spite of SR 24 S having pre-transitional disk properties like DoAr 44, which does show water emission (Salyk et al. 2015). With R~100,000, the TEXES water spectra have the highest spectral resolution possible at this time, and allow for detailed lineshape analysis. We find that the mid-IR water emission lines are similar to the narrow component in CO rovibrational emission (Banzatti & Pontoppidan 2015), consistent with disk radii of a few AU. The emission lines are either single peaked, or consistent with a double peak. Single-peaked emission lines cannot be produced with a Keplerian disk model, and may suggest that water participates in the disk winds proposed to explain single-peaked CO emission lines (Bast et al. 2011, Pontoppidan et al. 2011). Double-peaked emission lines can be used to determine the radius at which the line emission luminosity drops off. For HL Tau, the lower limit on this measured dropoff radius is consistent with the 13 AU dark ring (ALMA partnership et al. 2015). We also report variable line/continuum ratios from the disks around DR Tau and RW Aur, which we attribute to continuum changes and line flux changes, respectively. The reduction in RW Aur line flux corresponds with an observed dimming at visible wavelengths (Rodriguez et al. 2013).
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