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Abstract 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.
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This content will become publicly available on July 30, 2026
A Comprehensive Analysis of Rovibrational CO in the Era of JWST
We present an analysis of CO rovibrational emission lines in the 183 infrared spectra of nearby Class II objects obtained with the NIRSPEC instrument on the Keck II telescope over the past two decades. The sample includes a broad range of stellar mass (both T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be) and disk evolutionary states (from full to debris disks). We find that 53% of the sample has CO rovibrational emission lines present in their spectrum with disk/stellar subtype detection rates of 82% for transition disks, 61% for Herbigs, and 77% for classical T Tauri stars. Although there is no discernible difference between T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be star CO detection rates, the detection of accretion and of CO are statistically correlated in T Tauri stars but not in Herbig Ae/Be objects. Within the sample of T Tauri stars, we find that no weak-line T Tauri stars have CO rovibrational emission lines. We use slab modeling to analyze the density, temperature, and emitting area of the sample. The retrieval results imply that Herbig Ae/Be objects tend to have cooler and larger CO emitting regions than T Tauri stars. We find that the CO emitting area is not a thin ring as defined by temperature, but a ring of varying size, likely dependent on the structure of the disk. We also present guidelines on how to approach CO rovibrational emission lines in JWST spectra and present methods for linking ground-based observations with JWST spectra. This includes line-to-continuum ratio estimates based on stellar mass and accretion rate.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2107445
- PAR ID:
- 10631971
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astronomical Journal
- Volume:
- 170
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0004-6256
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 130
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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