Herschel Photometry of Disks around Low-mass Stars in the R CrA Cloud

Abstract

We report photometric results from a subset of a Herschel-PACS program to observe cool dust in disks around low-mass stars as a complement to our earlier program to measure far-infrared emission from brown dwarfs. In this latest study we observed five low-mass objects in the nearby R Corona Australis region and detected at least three at 70 μm. Using a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code we have investigated the disk masses and geometry based on detailed spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling, and we compare these new results to those from our earlier larger sample of brown dwarfs. In particular, our SED analysis for these five objects shows again that disk geometries of brown dwarfs or low-mass stars are generally similar to their higher mass counterparts like T Tauri disks, but the range of disk mass extends to well below the value found in T Tauri stars.

Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA.