Palomar Testbed Interferometer Observations of Young Stellar Objects

Abstract

We present observations of a sample of Herbig AeBe stars, as well as the FU Orionis object V1057 Cygni. Our K-band (2.2 µm) observations from the Palomar Testbed Interferometer (PTI) used baselines of 110 m and 85 m, resulting in fringe spacings of ~ 4 mas and 5 mas, respectively. Fringes were obtained for the first time on V1057 Cygni as well as V594 Cas. Additional measurements were made of MWC147, while upper limits to visibility-squared are obtained for MWC297, HD 190073, and MWC614. These measurements are sensitive to the distribution of warm, circumstellar dust in these sources. If the circumstellar infrared emission comes from warm dust in a disk, the inclination of the disk to the line of sight implies that the observed interferometric visibilities should depend upon hour angle. Surprisingly, the observations of Millan-Gabet, Schloerb and Traub (2001) (hereafter MST) did not show significant variation with hour angle. However, limited sampling of angular frequencies on the sky was possible with the IOTA interferometer, motivating us to study a subset of their objects to further constrain these systems.