TY - JOUR
T1 - A search for passive protoplanetary discs in the Taurus-Auriga star-forming region
AU - Duchêne, Gaspard
AU - Becker, Adam
AU - Yang, Yizhe
AU - Bouy, Hervé
AU - De Rosa, Robert J.
AU - Patience, Jennifer
AU - Girard, Julien H.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the referee for a prompt report, which allowed us to strengthen our analysis. We are grateful to the support staff at all observatories where data presented in this study were obtained, and extend particular thanks to the Calar Alto Observatory staff, who conducted our observations in service mode, and to the daytime and night support staff at the OAN-SPM for facilitating and helping us to obtain our observations. This article is based on observations made in the Observatorios de Canarias del IAC with the William Herschel Telescope operated on the island of La Palma by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, and on observations collected at the Centro As-tronómico Hispano Alemán (CAHA) at Calar Alto, operated jointly by the Max-Planck Institut für Astronomie and the Instituto de As-trofísica de Andalucía (CSIC). We thank Calar Alto Observatory for allocation of director’s discretionary time to this programme. We also used observations obtained at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional on the Sierra San Pedro Mártir (OAN-SPM), Baja California, México. This work was partially supported by funds from the UC Berkeley Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program and by the Programa de Acceso a Grandes Instalaciones Científicas (No. 2009/00157 and 2009/00203), administered by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and El Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, España. RJDR was funded through a studentship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) ST/F 007124/1.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Authors.
PY - 2017/8/1
Y1 - 2017/8/1
N2 - We conducted a 12-month monitoring campaign of 33 T Tauri stars (TTS) in Taurus. Our goal was to monitor objects that possess a disc but have a weak Hα line, a common accretion tracer for young stars, in order to determine whether they host a passive circumstellar disc.We used medium-resolution optical spectroscopy to assess the accretion status of the objects and to measure the Hα line. We found no convincing examples of passive discs: Only transition disc and debris disc systems in our sample are non-accreting. Among accretors, we found no example of flickering accretion, leading to an upper limit of 2.2 per cent on the duty cycle of accretion gaps, assuming that all accreting TTS experience such events. When combining literature results with our observations, we found that the reliability of traditional Hα-based criteria to test for accretion is high but imperfect, particularly for low-mass TTS. We found a significant correlation between stellar mass and the full width at 10 per cent of the peak (W10) of the Hα line that does not seem to be related to variations in free-fall velocity. Finally, our data revealed a positive correlation between the Hα equivalent width and its W10, indicative of a systematic modulation in the line profile whereby the high-velocity wings of the line are proportionally more enhanced than its core when the line luminosity increases. We argue that this supports the hypothesis that the mass accretion rate on the central star is correlated with the Hα W10 through a common physical mechanism.
AB - We conducted a 12-month monitoring campaign of 33 T Tauri stars (TTS) in Taurus. Our goal was to monitor objects that possess a disc but have a weak Hα line, a common accretion tracer for young stars, in order to determine whether they host a passive circumstellar disc.We used medium-resolution optical spectroscopy to assess the accretion status of the objects and to measure the Hα line. We found no convincing examples of passive discs: Only transition disc and debris disc systems in our sample are non-accreting. Among accretors, we found no example of flickering accretion, leading to an upper limit of 2.2 per cent on the duty cycle of accretion gaps, assuming that all accreting TTS experience such events. When combining literature results with our observations, we found that the reliability of traditional Hα-based criteria to test for accretion is high but imperfect, particularly for low-mass TTS. We found a significant correlation between stellar mass and the full width at 10 per cent of the peak (W10) of the Hα line that does not seem to be related to variations in free-fall velocity. Finally, our data revealed a positive correlation between the Hα equivalent width and its W10, indicative of a systematic modulation in the line profile whereby the high-velocity wings of the line are proportionally more enhanced than its core when the line luminosity increases. We argue that this supports the hypothesis that the mass accretion rate on the central star is correlated with the Hα W10 through a common physical mechanism.
KW - Circumstellar matter
KW - Stars: Variables: T Tauri, Herbig Ae/Be
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U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stx852
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stx852
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85052506024
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 469
SP - 1783
EP - 1808
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 2
ER -