A Submillimeter View of Circumstellar Dust Disks in $\rho$ Ophiuchus

Abstract

We present new multiwavelength submillimeter continuum measurements of the circumstellar dust around 48 young stars in the $\rho$ Ophiuchus dark clouds. Supplemented with previous 1.3 mm observations of an additional 99 objects from the literature, the statistical distributions of disk masses and submillimeter colors are calculated and compared to those in the Taurus-Auriga region. These basic submillimeter properties of young stellar objects in both environments are shown to be essentially identical. As with their Taurus counterparts, the $\rho$ Oph circumstellar dust properties are shown to evolve along an empirical evolution sequence based on the infrared spectral energy distribution. The combined $\rho$ Oph and Taurus Class II samples (173 sources) are used to set benchmark values for basic outer disk characteristics: M_disk ~ 0.005 solar masses, M_disk/M_star ~ 1%, and $\alpha$ ~ 2 (where $F_{\nu }\propto {\nu }^{\alpha }$ between 350 microns and 1.3 mm). The precision of these numbers are addressed in the context of substantial solid particle growth in the earliest stages of the planet formation process. There is some circumstantial evidence that disk masses inferred from submillimeter emission may be under-estimated by up to an order of magnitude.

accepted in ApJ; 38 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (16)

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• The chemical history of molecules in circumstellar disks. I. Ices
• Dust retention in protoplanetary disks
• Line Emission from Gas in Optically Thick Dust Disks around Young Stars
• The nature of the Class I population in Ophiuchus as revealed through gas and dust mapping
• Shells, jets, and internal working surfaces in the molecular outflow from IRAS 04166+2706
• Proplyds and Massive Disks in the Orion Nebula Cluster Imaged with CARMA and SMA
• The young population of the Chamaeleon II dark cloud
• The Masses of Transition Circumstellar Disks: Observational Support for Photoevaporation Models
• Planet formation around stars of various masses: Hot super-Earths
• The Circumstellar Disk Mass Distribution in the Orion Trapezium Cluster
• The Peculiar Periodic YSO WL 4 in Rho Ophiuchus
• The Structure of the DoAr 25 Circumstellar Disk
• Submillimeter Observations of the Young Low-Mass Object IRAS 04158+2805
• A sub-AU outwardly truncated accretion disk around a classical T Tauri star