Herschel-PACS observation of the 10 Myr old T Tauri disk TW Hya. Constraining the disk gas mass

Planets are formed in disks around young stars. With an age of ~10 Myr, TW Hya is one of the nearest T Tauri stars that is still surrounded by a relatively massive disk. In addition a large number of molecules has been found in the TW Hya disk, making TW Hya the perfect test case in a large survey of disks with Herschel-PACS to directly study their gaseous component. We aim to constrain the gas and dust mass of the circumstellar disk around TW Hya. We observed the fine-structure lines of [O i] and [C ii] as part of the open-time large program GASPS. We complement this with continuum data and ground-based ¹² CO 3-2 and ¹³CO 3-2 observations. We simultaneously model the continuum and the line fluxes with the 3D Monte-Carlo code MCFOST and the thermo-chemical code ProDiMo to derive the gas and dust masses. We detect the [O i] line at 63 μm. The other lines that were observed, [O i] at 145 μm and [C ii] at 157 μm, are not detected. No extended emission has been found. Preliminary modeling of the photometric and line data assuming [ ¹²CO] /[ ¹³CO] = 69 suggests a dust mass for grains with radius <1 mm of ~1.9 × 10^-4 M_⊙ (total solid mass of 3 × 10^-3 M_⊙) and a gas mass of (0.5-5) × 10^-3 M_⊙. The gas-to-dust mass may be lower than the standard interstellar value of 100.

Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by Principal Investigator consortia. It is open for proposals for observing time from the worldwide astronomical community.Appendix is only available in electronic form at http://www.aanda.org