TY - JOUR
T1 - Disk Masses for Embedded Class i Protostars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud
AU - Sheehan, Patrick D.
AU - Eisner, Josh A.
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. 2012115762. This work was supported by NSF AAG grant 1311910. The results reported herein benefited from collaborations and/or information exchange within NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
Funding Information:
We would like to thank Nick Ballering for many useful conversations regarding our MCMC fitting procedure, and Dan Marrone for helping to expedite the acquisition of our CARMA data set. We’d also like to thank our anonymous referee for comments that helped to improve the paper. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. 2012115762. This work was supported by NSF AAG grant 1311910. The results reported herein benefited from collaborations and/or information exchange within NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Support for CARMA construction was derived from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Associates of the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the states of California, Illinois, and Maryland, and the National Science Foundation. CARMA development and operations were supported by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement, and by the CARMA partner universities.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/12/10
Y1 - 2017/12/10
N2 - Class I protostars are thought to represent an early stage in the lifetime of protoplanetary disks, when they are still embedded in their natal envelope. Here we measure the disk masses of 10 Class I protostars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud to constrain the initial mass budget for forming planets in disks. We use radiative transfer modeling to produce synthetic protostar observations and fit the models to a multi-wavelength data set using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo fitting procedure. We fit these models simultaneously to our new Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy 1.3 mm observations that are sensitive to the wide range of spatial scales that are expected from protostellar disks and envelopes so as to be able to distinguish each component, as well as broadband spectral energy distributions compiled from the literature. We find a median disk mass of 0.018 Mo on average, more massive than the Taurus Class II disks, which have median disk mass of ∼0.0025 Mo. This decrease in disk mass can be explained if dust grains have grown by a factor of 75 in grain size, indicating that by the Class II stage, at a few Myr, a significant amount of dust grain processing has occurred. However, there is evidence that significant dust processing has occurred even during the Class I stage, so it is likely that the initial mass budget is higher than the value quoted here.
AB - Class I protostars are thought to represent an early stage in the lifetime of protoplanetary disks, when they are still embedded in their natal envelope. Here we measure the disk masses of 10 Class I protostars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud to constrain the initial mass budget for forming planets in disks. We use radiative transfer modeling to produce synthetic protostar observations and fit the models to a multi-wavelength data set using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo fitting procedure. We fit these models simultaneously to our new Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy 1.3 mm observations that are sensitive to the wide range of spatial scales that are expected from protostellar disks and envelopes so as to be able to distinguish each component, as well as broadband spectral energy distributions compiled from the literature. We find a median disk mass of 0.018 Mo on average, more massive than the Taurus Class II disks, which have median disk mass of ∼0.0025 Mo. This decrease in disk mass can be explained if dust grains have grown by a factor of 75 in grain size, indicating that by the Class II stage, at a few Myr, a significant amount of dust grain processing has occurred. However, there is evidence that significant dust processing has occurred even during the Class I stage, so it is likely that the initial mass budget is higher than the value quoted here.
KW - protoplanetary disks
KW - stars: formation
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/aa9990
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/aa9990
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85038814722
VL - 851
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
SN - 0004-637X
IS - 1
M1 - 45
ER -