Inner Disks Around Young Stars
A wealth of evidence has accumulated over the last decade or so proving the existence of massive disks of dust and gas around some pre-main sequence stars. However, the innermost regions of these disks, where material accretes from the disk onto the star, remain poorly studied due to the lack of high-angular resolution observations. Over the past several years, I have been observing T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be stars at milliarcsecond resolution using the Palomar Testbed Interferometer and the Keck Interferometer. Early results provided size scales and basic geometries of dust within an AU of these young stars ( Eisner et al. 2003 ; 2004; 2005; 2006; 2007). In 2006 we commissioned a grism with a resolving power of 240 at the Keck Interferometer and used it to constrain gas, as well, as dust around young stars (Eisner 2007); this work was also described in this article. We have recently commissioned a grism with an order of magnitude higher dispersion, and are currently using it to spectrally and spatially resolve gaseous emission features at sub-AU radii around young stars.


Josh Eisner; July 7, 2008