Radiative Ablation of Disks Around O and B Stars

Radiative Ablation of Disks Around Massive Stars

Authors:

Kee et al

Abstract:

Hot, massive stars (spectral types O and B) have extreme luminosities (104−106L⊙) that drive strong stellar winds through UV line-scattering. Some massive stars also have disks, formed by either decretion from the star (as in the rapidly rotating "Classical Be stars"), or accretion during the star's formation. This dissertation examines the role of stellar radiation in driving (ablating) material away from these circumstellar disks.

A key result is that the observed month to year decay of Classical Be disks can be explained by line-driven ablation without, as previously done, appealing to anomalously strong viscous diffusion. Moreover, the higher luminosity of O stars leads to ablation of optically thin disks on dynamical timescales of order a day, providing a natural explanation for the lack of observed Oe stars. In addition to the destruction of Be disks, this dissertation also introduces a model for their formation by coupling observationally inferred non-radial pulsation modes and rapid stellar rotation to launch material into orbiting Keplerian disks.

In contrast to such Be decretion disks, star-forming accretion disks are much denser and so are generally optically thick to continuum processes. To circumvent the computational challenges associated with radiation hydrodynamics through optically thick media, we develop an approximate method for treating continuum absorption in the limit of geometrically thin disks. The comparison of ablation with and without continuum absorption shows that accounting for disk optical thickness leads to less than a 50% reduction in ablation rate, implying that ablation rate depends mainly on stellar properties like luminosity.

No Sign O & B Class Stars Destroy Their Protoplanetary Disks

NO EVIDENCE FOR PROTOPLANETARY DISK DESTRUCTION BY OB STARS IN THE MYStIX SAMPLE

Authors:

Richert et al

Abstract:

Hubble Space Telescope images of proplyds in the Orion Nebula, as well as submillimeter/radio measurements, show that the dominant O7 star ${\theta }^{1}$Ori C photoevaporates nearby disks around pre-main-sequence stars. Theory predicts that massive stars photoevaporate disks within distances of the order of 0.1 pc. These findings suggest that young, OB-dominated massive H ii regions are inhospitable to the survival of protoplanetary disks and, subsequently, to the formation and evolution of planets. In the current work, we test this hypothesis using large samples of pre-main-sequence stars in 20 massive star-forming regions selected with X-ray and infrared photometry in the MYStIX survey. Complete disk destruction would lead to a deficit of cluster members with an excess in JHKS and Spitzer/IRAC bands in the vicinity of O stars. In four MYStIX regions containing O stars and a sufficient surface density of disk-bearing sources to reliably test for spatial avoidance, we find no evidence for the depletion of inner disks around pre-main-sequence stars in the vicinity of O-type stars, even very luminous O2?O5 stars. These results suggest that massive star-forming regions are not very hostile to the survival of protoplanetary disks and, presumably, to the formation of planets.

How Much Water Does Brown Dwarf/Giant Planet Kappa Andromedae b Have?

The Water Abundance of the Directly Imaged Substellar Companion κ And b Retrieved from a Near Infrared Spectrum

Authors:

Todorov et al

Abstract:

Recently, spectral retrieval has proven to be a powerful tool for constraining the physical properties and atmospheric compositions of extrasolar planet atmospheres from observed spectra, primarily for transiting objects but also increasingly for directly imaged planets and brown dwarfs. Despite its strengths, this approach has been applied to only about a dozen targets. Determining the abundances of the main carbon and oxygen-bearing compounds in a planetary atmosphere can lead to the C/O ratio of the object, which is crucial in understanding its formation and migration history. We present a retrieval analysis on the published near-infrared spectrum of {\kappa} And b, a directly imaged substellar companion to a young B9 star. We fit the emission spectrum model utilizing a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We estimate the abundance of water vapor, and its uncertainty, in the atmosphere of the object. We also place upper limits on the abundances of carbon dioxide and methane and constrain the pressure-temperature profile of the atmosphere. We compare our results to studies that have applied model retrieval on multiband photometry and emission spectroscopy of hot Jupiters (extrasolar giant planets with orbital periods of several days) and the directly imaged giant planet HR 8799b. We find that the water abundances of the hot Jupiters and the two directly imaged planets inhabit overlapping regions of parameter space and that their P-T profiles are qualitatively similar, despite the wide range of effective temperatures and incident stellar fluxes for these objects.