Fullerenes in the circumstellar medium of Herbig Ae/Be stars: Insights from the Spitzer mid-infrared spectral catalog

Abstract

This study presents the largest mid-infrared spectral catalog of Herbig Ae/Be stars to date, containing the Spitzer Infrared Spectrograph spectra of 126 stars. Based on the catalog analysis, two prominent infrared vibrational modes of C\textsubscript{60} bands at 17.4 $\mu m$ and 18.9 $\mu m$ are detected in the spectra of nine sources, while 7.0 $\mu m$ feature is identified in the spectra of HD 319896. The spectral index analysis and the comparison of the known sources with C\textsubscript{60} features indicated that there exist two different types of emission classes among the sample of stars. The infrared spectra of six Herbig Ae/Be stars in this study resemble that of reflection nebulae, and their association with previously known reflection nebulae is confirmed. In the case of three Herbig Ae/Be stars we report the tentative evidence of C\textsubscript{60} emission features originating from the circumstellar disk or nearby diffused emission region. The detection fraction of C\textsubscript{60} in the total HAeBe star sample is $\sim$ 7\%, whereas the detection fraction is 30\% for HAeBe stars associated with nebulosity. In the catalog, C\textsubscript{60} is exclusively present in the circumstellar regions of B type Herbig Ae/Be stars, with no evidence of its presence detected in stars with later spectral types. The present study has increased the number of young stellar objects and reflection nebulae detected with C\textsubscript{60} multifold, which can help in understanding the excitation and formation pathway of the species.

arXiv comment14 pages,2 tables, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (46)

• The Spitzer Space Telescope Mission
• Estimating distances from parallaxes. V: Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3
• The Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope
• X-shooter, the new wide band intermediate resolution spectrograph at the ESO Very Large Telescope
• Interpreting Spectral Energy Distributions from Young Stellar Objects. II. Fitting observed SEDs using a large grid of pre-computed models
• ISO spectroscopy of circumstellar dust in 14 Herbig Ae/Be systems: towards an understanding of dust processing
• Formation of buckminsterfullerene (C60) in interstellar space
• C${}_{60}$ in Reflection Nebulae
• CASSIS: The Cornell Atlas of Spitzer/IRS Sources
• A spectroscopic survey of Herbig Ae/Be stars with X-Shooter I: Stellar parameters and accretion rates
• Formation of fullerenes in H-containing Planetary Nebulae
• Gaia DR2 study of Herbig Ae/Be stars
• Laboratory formation of fullerenes from PAHs: Top-down interstellar chemistry
• Observational $5-20\mu$m Interstellar Extinction Curves Toward Star-Forming Regions Derived from Spitzer IRS Spectra
• Disk Evolution in the three Nearby Star-Forming Regions of Taurus, Chamaeleon, and Ophiuchus
• Evolution of emission line activity in intermediate mass young stars
• Spitzer's view on aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbon emission in Herbig Ae stars
• An all-sky Support Vector Machine selection of WISE YSO Candidates
• The formation of fullerenes: clues from new C60, C70, and (possible) planar C24 detections in Magellanic Cloud Planetary Nebulae
• Characterizing the nature of embedded young stellar objects through silicate, ice and millimeter observations
• An evolutionary catalogue of Galactic post-AGB and related objects
• CASSIS: The Cornell Atlas of Spitzer/Infrared Spectrograph Sources. II. High-resolution observations
• Physical Properties of Fullerene-containing Galactic Planetary Nebulae
• The 15 - 20 Micron Spitzer Spectra of Interstellar Emission Features in NGC 7023
• Homogeneous study of Herbig Ae/Be stars from spectral energy distributions and Gaia EDR3
• Detection of C60 in embedded young stellar objects, a Herbig Ae/Be star and an unusual post-AGB star
• Catalogue of new Herbig Ae/Be and classical Be stars. A machine learning approach to Gaia DR2
• Spitzer Infrared Spectrograph survey of young stars in the Chamaeleon I star-forming region
• The 15-20 um emission in the reflection nebula NGC2023
• Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon in Protoplanetary Disks around Herbig Ae/Be and T Tauri Stars
• Spitzer reveals what's behind Orion's Bar
• Candidate planetary nebulae in the IPHAS photometric catalogue
• Detection of Buckminsterfullerene emission in the diffuse interstellar medium
• On the mass accretion rate and infrared excess in Herbig Ae/Be Stars
• Spatially Resolved 3 micron Spectroscopy of Elias 1: Origin of Diamonds in Protoplanetary Disks
• C${}_{60}$ in Photodissociation Regions
• Probing the Ionization States of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons via the 15-20 μm Emission Bands
• Tracing Accretion onto Herbig Ae/Be Stars Using the Brγ Line
• A catalog of early-type Hα emission line stars and 58 newly confirmed Herbig Ae/Bes from LAMOST DR7
• A WISE Census of Young Stellar Objects in Perseus OB2 Association
• Excitation mechanism of OI lines in Herbig Ae/Be stars
• Distinguishing post-AGB impostors in a sample of pre-main sequence stars
• A census of young stellar population associated with the Herbig Be star HD 200775
• Discovery of 2716 hot emission-line stars from LAMOST DR5
• Efficiency of the top-down PAH-to-fullerene conversion in UV irradiated environments
• Fullerenes in the IC 348 star cluster of the Perseus Molecular Cloud

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Hydrogenated amorphous carbon grains as an alternative carrier of the 9$-$13$\mu$m plateau feature in the fullerene planetary nebula Tc 1