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Compact protoplanetary disks around the stars of a young binary system

Nature volume 395, pages 355–357 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

Planet formation is believed to occur in the disks of gas and dust that surround young solar-type stars1. Most stars, however, form in multiple systems2,3,4,5, where the presence of a close companion could affect the structure of the disk6,7,8 and perhaps interfere with planet formation. It has been difficult to investigate this because of the resolution needed. Here we report interferometric observations (at a wavelength of 7 mm) of the core of the star-forming region L1551. We have achieved a linear resolution of seven astronomical units (less than the diameter of Jupiter's orbit). The core of L1551 contains two distinct disks, with a separation of 45 AU; these appear to be associated with a binary system. Both disks are spatially resolved, with semi-major axes of about 10 AU, which is about a factor of ten smaller than disks around isolated stars9,10,11,12. The disk masses are of order 0.05 solar masses, which could be enough to form planetary systems like our own.

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Figure 1: Cleaned, natural-weight Very Large Array (VLA) map of the L1551 IRS5 region at 7 mm.
Figure 2: Cleaned VLA map of the L1551 IRS5 region at 3.6 cm made with the task IMAGR of AIPS and Briggs' ROBUST parameter set equal to −0.5.
Figure 3: Centimetre and millimetre spectrum of the northern (top) and southern (bottom) components in L1551 IRS5 (data from Table 1).

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate the open policy of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the US National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. In particular, we thank the NRAO personnel involved in the 7-mm upgrade. The 7-mm receivers used for these observations were built with the support of CONACyT, México. We thank A. Poveda for his comments on binary stars.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Astronomía, UNAM Apdo, Postal 70-264, México, DF 04510, México

    L. F. Rodríguez, P. D'Alessio, S. Curiel, Y. Gómez, S. Lizano, J. Cantó & A. C. Raga

  2. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    D. J. Wilner & P. T. P. Ho

  3. Instituto de Astrofsica de Andalucía, CSIC Sancho Panza s/n, Apdo, Correos 3004, Granada, E-18080, Spain

    J. M. Torrelles

  4. IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), 07071 Palma, Spain

    J. M. Torrelles

  5. NRAL, University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank, Macclesfield, SK11 9DL, Cheshire, UK

    A. Pedlar

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  1. L. F. Rodríguez
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Correspondence to L. F. Rodríguez.

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Rodríguez, L., D'Alessio, P., Wilner, D. et al. Compact protoplanetary disks around the stars of a young binary system. Nature 395, 355–357 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/26421

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