Oral Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

A multi-wavelength study of the GQ Lup protoplanetary disc (#49)

Catarina Ubach 1 , Sarah Maddison 1 , Christopher Wright 2 , Francois Menard 3
  1. Swinburne University, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia
  2. ADFA@UNSW, Canberra, Australia
  3. UMIFA-FCA, CNRS/INSU France, Santiago, Chile

To observe the first stages planet formation around the 1Myr old classical T Tauri star GQ Lup, a multi-wavelength survey at 3, 7 and 15 mm was conducted with ATCA. We found the flux is temporally stable in all three wavebands, suggesting the flux is dominated by thermal dust emission. Our results also suggest that the protoplanetary disc contains large cm-sized pebbles and has an outer disc radius greater than 200 AU. Our disc size contradicts previous 1.3 mm SMA observations by Dai et al. (2010)1 , who suggested  a compact disc with an outer radius confined to 25 – 75 AU best fitted the data. Since their model did not account for the longer wavelength data, which provides information about larger grains that affect the temperature distribution and dust disc mass estimates, we used the radiative transfer code MCFOST to fit our longer millimetre observations along with the SMA data and shorter wavelength observations from the literature. Here we present the results for both our multi-wavelength survey and the full parameter sweep.

  1. Dai et al., 2010, AJ, 139, 626