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Measuring the physical conditions of accreting gas in T Tauri systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2007

Jeffrey S. Bary  and
Sean P. Matt
Jeffrey S. Bary
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22902, USA email: jbary@virginia.edu, spm5x@virginia.edu
Sean P. Matt
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22902, USA email: jbary@virginia.edu, spm5x@virginia.edu
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Abstract

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Hydrogen emission lines observed from T Tauri stars (TTS) are associated with the accretion/outflow of gas in these young star forming systems. Magnetospheric accretion models have been moderately successful at reproducing the shapes of several Hi emission line profiles, suggesting that the emission arises in the accretion funnels. Despite considerable effort to model and observe these emission features, the physical conditions of the gas confined to the funnel flows remain poorly constrained by observation. We conducted a mutli-epoch near-infrared spectroscopic survey of 16 actively accreting classical TTS in the Taurus-Auriga star forming region. We present an analysis of these simultaneously acquired line flux ratios of many Paschen and Brackett series emission lines, in which we compare the observed ratios to those predicted by the Case B approximation of hydrogen recombination line theory. We find that the line flux ratios for the Paschen and Brackett decrements as well as a comparison between Brγ and Paschen transitions agree well with the Case B models with T < 5000 K and ne ≈ 1010 cm−3.

Keywords

Accretionstars: low-massformationvariables: T Tauri starsinfrared: stars
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 3 , Symposium S243: Star-Disk Interaction in Young Stars , May 2007 , pp. 95 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2007

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