Kinematics of Ionized Gas at 0.01 AU of TW Hya

TL;DR

This study uses spectroastrometry to analyze the ionized gas kinematics at 0.01 AU of TW Hya, revealing disk rotation consistent with previous observations but no clear evidence of disk wind.

Contribution

First detailed spectroastrometric analysis of ionized gas at such close proximity to TW Hya, linking gas kinematics to disk rotation and inner disk structure.

Findings

Centroid displacement aligns with disk rotation direction.

Ionized gas kinematics match the protoplanetary disk orientation.

No clear evidence of disk wind detected.

Abstract

We report two-dimensional spectroastrometry of Br gamma emission of TW Hya to study the kinematics of the ionized gas in the star-disk interface region. The spectroastrometry with the integral field spectrograph SINFONI at the Very Large Telescope is sensitive to the positional offset of the line emission down to the physical scale of the stellar diameter (~0.01 AU). The centroid of Br gamma emission is displaced to the north with respect to the central star at the blue side of the emission line, and to the south at the red side. The major axis of the centroid motion is P.A.= -20 degrees, which is nearly equal to the major axis of the protoplanetary disk projected on the sky, previously reported by CO sub millimeter spectroscopy (P.A.= -27 degrees) The line-of-sight motion of the Br gamma emission, in which the northern side of the disk is approaching toward us, is also consistent with the direction of the disk rotation known from the CO observation. The agreement implies that the kinematics of Br gamma emission is accounted for by the ionized gas in the inner edge of the disk. A simple modeling of the astrometry, however, indicates that the accretion inflow similarly well reproduces the centroid displacements of Br gamma, but only if the position angles of the centroid motion and the projected disk ellipse is a chance coincidence. No clear evidence of disk wind is found.