AL-Maothani, Anas Salman Taha (2019). Mid-Infrared Imaging of Two Circumstellar Disks: the cases of HD 179218 and Epsilon Eridani. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.
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Abstract
Recently, large ground-based telescopes and the new generation of astronomical instrumentation have allowed us to examine the environments of young stellar objects with high angular resolution. Mid-infrared (MIR) (7.5 - 25 micron) detectors mounted on 10 m class telescopes have been used extensively to study the properties of protoplanetary and debris disks through their thermal emission that comes from the dust. These instruments can achieve sub-arcsec resolution with a suitable field-of-view for investigating the disk structures on different scales from few to tens of astronomical units (AU). Such observations are used to study the evolution of the circumstellar disk, confirm the presence of gaps in the protoplanetary disks, and investigate the evolutionary connection between flared and flat disks. Moreover, they can provide us with more details about the geometry of the disk, dust properties, and how planets form. These observations can also be used to analyze the debris disk around main sequence stars and trace the origin of the dust emission to clarify the relation between the dust emission and planets in debris disks. There are two main projects in this dissertation: First project: The main goal of this project is to investigate in the MIR the properties of the Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) emission and the physical structure of the disk of the Herbig star HD 179218. I used MIR images in the PAH1(8.6 μm), PAH2(11.3 μm), and Si6(12.5 μm) filters, and N-band low-resolution spectra of HD 179218, using the CanariCam instrument on the 10.4 m Grand Telescopio Canarias (GTC). The FWHM of the images was measured in each of the three filters. Good observing conditions led to very stable measurements during the observation with average FWHM values of 0.232 00 , 0.280 00 , and 0.293 00 in filters PAH1, PAH2, and Si6, respectively. The data show that the disk emission is spatially resolved in the both PAH filters, while unresolved in the Si6 filter. I have extracted a lower limit for the angular diameter of the emission in the PAH band of ∼ 100 mas, (or 40 AU) by applying a quadratic subtraction of the PSF for the science and calibrator. The photometric measurements are consistent with published flux densities and without noticeable variability in the uncertainty. Besides that, the low-resolution spectrum result is comparable with the shape of the previous result using Spitzer and ISO space telescopes, except in the region ofthe Earth ozone band. Additionally, I built a 3-D radiative transfer model of the continuum emission of the protoplanetary disk using the code RADMC3D. The model is based on a disk with a gap to fit the observational spectral energy distribution and the radial brightness profile of HD 179218 at 12.5 μm. The physical properties such as the mass, size and chemical composition of the pre-transitional disk were derived from the model. This is the first time that HD 179218 is observed in the PAH filter and is spatially resolved. Finally, I discuss the origin of the PAH emission in the protoplanetary disk of HD 179218 by comparing the images and spectroscopic data with IRS 48 and HD 97048. The most likely explanation is that the PAH emission originates in the outer radius of the flared disk surface, and is mostly in an ionized charged state due to the strong UV radiation of the centralstar (180 L�). Second project: The main purpose of this project is to investigate the origin of the warm dust in the debris disk and of the exozodiacal dust around the main-sequence star Epsilon Eridani. High-resolution direct imaging in the Q-band using GTC / CanariCam instrument was performed to enhance the star-to-disk distinction and obtain diffraction limited bservations, we select the Q4 filter (20.5 μm). The MIR images of Epsilon Eridani were compared with a calibration star (Gamma Eridani). Due to poor seeing condition (> 1 00 ) the FWHM is very unstable.Consequently, more than half of the FWHM measurements of the science star were less than the diffraction limit of the telescope in the Q4 filter. Therefore, I used different techniques to examine the quality of good frames. The first technique is to compare the FWHM of each saveset of the calibration star and science star to the 1σ, 2σ, and 3σ levels. The result of this technique shows that the extended emission around Epsilon Eridani measures 200 mas with 3σ uncertainty. The second technique is to compare the FWHM measurements of each nodset (instead of the saveset) for the science star with a limit of 1σ, which shows a resolved disk emission with a diameter of 120 mas with 3σ uncertainty. Then, I used a visual selection technique to separate the good and bad nodsets to avoid electing elongated point-spread function with this technique and other two techniques are confirmed the results of found extend emission around Epsilon Eridani. The extended emission is estimated to be ∼ 180 mas with 3σ uncertainty. A temperature gradient model has been built to create a synthetic image of Epsilon Eridani, convolve it with the calibration image and then fit it with a radial brightness profile of the science image. Photometric calculations were performed and I obtain a flux value comparable to literature value in the Q4 filter of ∼ 2.5 Jy. The observational result suggests that the radial position of the dust is comparable with the planetary orbit and that the dust distribution is significantly shaped by the interaction with the planet.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD thesis) | ||||||||
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-92016 | ||||||||
Date: | 4 January 2019 | ||||||||
Language: | English | ||||||||
Faculty: | Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences > Department of Physics > Institute of Physics I | ||||||||
Subjects: | Natural sciences and mathematics Physics |
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Date of oral exam: | 17 January 2018 | ||||||||
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Funders: | Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Sci- entific Research (MoHERS), University of Baghad - College of Science, Bonn-Cologne Grad- uate School (BCGS) for Physics and Astronomy. | ||||||||
Refereed: | Yes | ||||||||
URI: | http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/9201 |
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