Curved walls: Grain growth, settling, and composition patterns in T Tauri disk dust sublimation fronts

TL;DR

This study models the curved dust sublimation walls in T Tauri star disks, revealing how grain size, composition, and dust distribution vary with accretion rate, providing insights into planet-forming regions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed model of curved, two-layer dust sublimation walls in T Tauri disks, linking grain properties and dust distribution to accretion rates and disk structure.

Findings

Grain size decreases with lower accretion rates.

Walls contribute significantly to 10 micron silicate emission.

Evidence of an iron gradient in the disk.

Abstract

The dust sublimation walls of disks around T Tauri stars represent a directly observable cross-section through the disk atmosphere and midplane. Their emission properties can probe the grain size distribution and composition of the innermost regions of the disk, where terrestrial planets form. Here we calculate the inner dust sublimation wall properties for four classical T Tauri stars with a narrow range of spectral types and inclination angles and a wide range of mass accretion rates to determine the extent to which the walls are radially curved. Best-fits to the near- and mid-IR excesses are found for curved, 2-layer walls in which the lower layer contains larger, hotter, amorphous pyroxene grains with Mg/(Mg+Fe)=0.6 and the upper layer contains submicron, cooler, mixed amorphous olivine and forsterite grains. As the mass accretion rates decrease from 10^(-8) to 10^(-10) Msol/yr, the maximum grain size in the lower layer decreases from 3 to 0.5 microns. We attribute this to a decrease in fragmentation and turbulent support for micron-sized grains with decreasing viscous heating. The atmosphere of these disks is depleted of dust with dust-gas mass ratios 1x10^(-4) of the ISM value, while the midplane is enhanced to 8 times the ISM value. For all accretion rates, the wall contributes at least half of the flux in the optically thin 10 micron silicate feature. Finally, we find evidence for an iron gradient in the disk, suggestive of that found in our solar system.