Friday, January 13, 2012

1201.2421 (Sebastian Daemgen et al.)

Protoplanetary Disks of T T Binary Systems in the Orion Nebula Cluster    [PDF]

Sebastian Daemgen, Serge Correia, Monika G. Petr-Gotzens
We present a study of protoplanetary disks in spatially resolved low-mass binary stars in the well-known Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) in order to assess the impact of binarity on the properties of circumstellar disks and its relation to the cluster environment. This is the currently largest such study in a clustered high stellar density star forming environment. We particularly aim at determining the presence of magnetospheric accretion and dust disks for each binary component, and at measuring the overall disk frequency. We carried out spatially resolved Adaptive Optics assisted near-IR photometry and spectroscopy of 26 binaries in the ONC, and determine stellar parameters such as effective temperatures and spectral types, luminosities, masses, as well as accretion properties and near-infrared excess for individual binary components. A fraction of 40(+10/-9)% of the binary components in the sample can be inferred to be T Tauri stars possesing an accretion disk. This is marginally lower than the disk fraction of single stars of ~50% in the ONC. We find that disks in wide binaries of >200AU separation are consistent with random pairing, while the evolution of circumprimary and circumsecondary disks is observed to be synchronized in closer binaries. Circumbinary disks appear to be not suited to explain this difference. Further, we identify several mixed pairs of accreting and non-accreting components, suggesting that these systems are common, and without preference for the more or less massive component to evolve faster. The derived mass accretion rates of the ONC binary components are of similar magnitude as those for ONC single stars and for binaries in the Taurus star forming region. The paper concludes with a discussion of the (presumably weak) connection between the presence of inner accretion disks in young binary systems and the existence of planets in stellar multiples.(abridged)
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2421

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