Milli-arcsecond Imaging of the Inner Regions of Protoplanetary Disks
First Author:
Stephanie Renard
Email: srenard AT ujf-grenoble.fr
Grenoble Observatory
BP 53
F-38041 GRENOBLE Cédex 9 FRANCE
Coauthors:
Fabien Malbet, Caltech/LAOG
Eric Thiebaut, (CRAL),
Jean-Philippe Berger, LAOG
Abstract
Planets are believed to form in circumstellar disks around newly born stars at disatnces that ranges between 0.1 AU to 10 AUs. This location corresponds to milli-arcsecond scales at the distance of the closest star forming regions and to temperature scales ranging from a few hundred Kelvins to a few thousands Kelvin. Therefore infrared long baseline interferometry is very complementary to infrared spectrophotometry provided by Spitzer to reveal the structure of the inner regions of protoplanetary disks. However, the information obtained so far are scarce visibility measurements which can only constrain a priory theoretical models. With the outcome of recent multi aperture interferometers, we can now reconstruct images of the close environments of these young stars reconstructed independently of any models like what is done routinely in the radio domain. In this contribution, we analyze the results of MIRA, an image reconstruction algorithm developed for optical interferometry, on interferometric data obtained on a variety of young stellar objects and discuss the consequences on the models which have been used so far.
