First results of the Herschel Key Program 'Dust, Ice and Gas in Time': Dust and Gas Spectroscopy of HD 100546

TL;DR

This study uses Herschel PACS far-infrared spectroscopy to analyze the dust and gas in the protoplanetary disk of HD 100546, revealing dust composition, temperature, and gas line emissions to understand disk evolution.

Contribution

First far-infrared spectral analysis of HD 100546's disk, providing detailed dust composition, temperature constraints, and gas line inventories using Herschel observations.

Findings

Dust grains at ~70 K or ~200 K depending on location

Detection of 32 gas emission lines from five species

Crystalline olivines contain few defects and minimal iron

Abstract

We present far-infrared spectroscopic observations, taken with the Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) on the Herschel Space Observatory, of the protoplanetary disk around the pre-main-sequence star HD 100546. These observations are the first within the DIGIT Herschel key program, which aims to follow the evolution of dust, ice, and gas from young stellar objects still embedded in their parental molecular cloud core, through the final pre-main-sequence phases when the circumstellar disks are dissipated. Our aim is to improve the constraints on temperature and chemical composition of the crystalline olivines in the disk of HD 100546 and to give an inventory of the gas lines present in its far-infrared spectrum. The 69 \mu\m feature is analyzed in terms of position and shape to derive the dust temperature and composition. Furthermore, we detected 32 emission lines from five gaseous species and measured their line fluxes. The 69 \mu\m emission comes either from dust grains with ~70 K at radii larger than 50 AU, as suggested by blackbody fitting, or it arises from ~200 K dust at ~13 AU, close to the midplane, as supported by radiative transfer models. We also conclude that the forsterite crystals have few defects and contain at most a few percent iron by mass. Forbidden line emission from [CII] at 157 \mu\m and [OI] at 63 and 145 \mu\m, most likely due to photodissociation by stellar photons, is detected. Furthermore, five H2O and several OH lines are detected. We also found high-J rotational transition lines of CO, with rotational temperatures of ~300 K for the transitions up to J=22-21 and T~800 K for higher transitions.