SpectroCam-10 AB Aurigae Page

High Resolution Imaging of AB Aurigae

K. A. Marsh, J. E. Van Cleve, M. J. Mahoney, T. L. Hayward, and J. R. Houck

In 1993 and 1994, we used SpectroCam-10 to observe the Herbig AeBe star AB Aurigae. This star's bright infrared emission is presumably due to a disk containing warm dust which surrounds the star. These disks are very interesting because they may be related to the formation of planets, although because they subtend extremely small angles they are difficult to study in detail.

The image at left is a composite of a 17.9 micron wavelength image (top) and two 11.7 micron images (bottom) of AB Aurigae made with SpectroCam-10. The outer box around each image is 3 x 3 arcseconds in size. Both images have been deconvolved against images of an unresolved star, and the inner boxes represent the assumed support domain of the deconvolution. The two 11.7 micron images were made on different observing runs.

The top image shows an elongated, extended structure which appears to be a nearly edge-on disk. AB Aurigae is also resolved in the bottom image, but at this wavelength we see a more circularly symmetric structure which is consistent between the two images. At the longer wavelength (top) we are evidently seeing a colder, more flattened disk, while the warmer dust which dominates at the shorter wavelengths (bottom) is distributed more uniformly around the star.