Physics and Astronomy

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Browsing Physics and Astronomy by Author "Aarnio, Alicia"

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    Gemini-LIGHTS: Herbig Ae/Be and Massive T Tauri Protoplanetary Disks Imaged with Gemini Planet Imager
    (IOP Publishing, 2022) Rich, Evan A.; Monnier, John D.; Aarnio, Alicia; Laws, Anna S. E.; Setterholm, Benjamin R.; Wilner, David J.; Calvet, Nuria; Harries, Tim; Miller, Chris; Davies, Claire L.; Adams, Fred C.; Andrews, Sean M.; Bae, Jaehan; Espaillat, Catherine; Greenbaum, Alexandra Z.; Hinkley, Sasha; Kraus, Stefan; Hartmann, Lee; Isella, Andrea; McClure, Melissa; Oppenheimer, Rebecca; Pérez, Laura M.; Zhu, Zhaohuan
    We present the complete sample of protoplanetary disks from the Gemini- Large Imaging with the Gemini Planet Imager Herbig/T Tauri Survey, which observed bright Herbig Ae/Be stars and T Tauri stars in near-infrared polarized light to search for signatures of disk evolution and ongoing planet formation. The 44 targets were chosen based on their near- and mid-infrared colors, with roughly equal numbers of transitional, pre-transitional, and full disks. Our approach explicitly did not favor well-known, “famous” disks or those observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, resulting in a less-biased sample suitable to probe the major stages of disk evolution during planet formation. Our optimized data reduction allowed polarized flux as low as 0.002% of the stellar light to be detected, and we report polarized scattered light around 80% of our targets. We detected point-like companions for 47% of the targets, including three brown dwarfs (two confirmed, one new), and a new super-Jupiter-mass candidate around V1295 Aql. We searched for correlations between the polarized flux and system parameters, finding a few clear trends: the presence of a companion drastically reduces the polarized flux levels, far-IR excess correlates with polarized flux for nonbinary systems, and systems hosting disks with ring structures have stellar masses <3 M⊙. Our sample also included four hot, dusty “FS CMa” systems, and we detected large-scale ( >100 au) scattered light around each, signs of extreme youth for these enigmatic systems. Science-ready images are publicly available through multiple distribution channels using a new FITS file standard that has been jointly developed with members of the Very Large Telescope Spectro-polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research team.