A Survey for Circumstellar Disks around Young Stellar Objects

Continuum observations at 1.3 mm of 86 pre-main sequence stars in the Taurus-Auriga dark clouds show that 42% have detectable emission from small particles. The detected fraction is only slightly smaller for the weak-line and "naked" T Tauri stars than for classical T Tauris, indicating that the former stars often have circumstellar material. In both categories, the column densities of particles are too large to be compatible with spherical distributions of circumstellar matter -- the optical extinctions would be too large; the particles are almost certainly in spatially thin, circumstellar disks. Models of the spectral energy distributions from 10 to 1300 μm indicate that for the most part the disks are transparent at 1.3 mm, although the innermost (≪1 AU) regions are opaque even at millimeter wavelenths. The aggregate particle masses are between 10^-5 and 10^-2 M_⊙. The disk mass does not decrease with increasing stellar age up to at least 10⁷ years among the stars detected at 1.3 mm. There is some evidence for temperature evolution, in the sense that older disks are colder and less luminous. There is little correlation between disk mass and Hα equivalent width among the detected stars, suggesting that the Hα line is not by itself indicative of disk mass. Spectral indices for several sources between 1.3 and 2.7 mm suggest that the particle emissivities ɛ are weaker functions of frequency ν than is the usual case of interstellar grains. Particle growth via adhesion in the dense disks might explain this result. The typical disk has an angular momentum comparable to that generally accepted for the early solar nebula, but very little stored energy, almost five orders of magnitude smaller than that of the central star. Our results demonstrate that disks more massive than the minimum mass of the proto-solar system commonly accompany the birth of solar-mass stars and suggest that planetary systems are common in the Galaxy.