The Herschel Gould Belt Survey in Chamaeleon II - Properties of cold dust in disks around young stellar objects

Abstract

Context. We report on the Herschel Gould Belt survey (HGBS) of the Chamaeleon II (Cha II) star-forming region, focusing on the detection of Class I to III young stellar objects (YSOs). Aims. We aim at characterizing the circumstellar material around these YSOs and at understanding which disk parameters are most likely constrained by the new HGBS data, which are expected to be crucial for studying the transition from optically thick disks to evolved debris-type disks. Methods. We recovered 29 of the 63 known YSOs in Cha II with a detection in at least one of the PACS/SPIRE pass-bands: 3 Class I YSOs (i.e.,100%), 1 flat source (i.e., 50%), 21 Class II objects (i.e., 55%), 3 Class III objects (i.e, 16%), and the unclassified far-infrared source IRAS 12522-7640. We explored PACS/SPIRE colors of this sample and modeled their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from the optical to Herschel’s wavelengths with the RADMC-2D radiative transfer code. Results. We find that YSO colors are typically confined to the following ranges: −0.7 ≲ log (F_(70)/F_(160)) ≲ 0.5, −0.5 ≲ log (F_(160)/F_(250)) ≲ 0.6, 0.05 ≲ log (F_(250)/F_(350)) ≲ 0.25 and −0.1 ≲ log (F_(350)/F_(500)) ≲ 0.5. These color ranges are expected to be only marginally contaminated by extragalactic sources and field stars and, hence, provide a useful YSO selection tool when applied together. We were able to model the SED of 26 of the 29 detected YSOs. We discuss the degeneracy/limitations of our SED fitting results and adopted the Bayesian method to estimate the probability of different values for the derived disk parameters. The Cha II YSOs present typical disk inner radii ≲0.1 AU, as previously estimated in the literature on the basis of Spitzer data. Our probability analysis shows that, thanks to the new Herschel data, the lower limits to the disk mass (M_(disk)) and characteristic radius (R_C) are well constrained, while the flaring angle (1 + φ) is only marginally constrained. The lower limit to R_C is typically around 50 AU. The lower limits to M_(disk) are proportional to the stellar masses with a typical 0.3% ratio, i.e., in the range estimated in the literature for young Class II stars and brown dwarfs across a broad range of stellar masses. The estimated flaring angles, although very uncertain, point toward very flat disks (1 + φ ≲ 1.2), as found for low-mass M-type YSO samples in other star-forming regions. Thus, our results support the idea that disk properties show a dependence on stellar properties.