P. Abraham 1, Ch. Leinert 1, D. Lemke 1, A. Burkert 2, & Th. Henning 2
1 Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie Heidelberg, Germany
2 Astrophysikalisches Institut und Universitats-Sternwarte Jena, Germany
Many intermediate mass stars show signatures of circumstellar material. The young pre-main sequence Herbig Ae/Be stars often show flat or rising spectral energy distributions (SEDs) in the far-infrared, attributed to thermal emission of heated circumstellar dust, the remnant of star formation.
We observed 8 Herbig Ae/Be with ISOPHOT in order to derive their SEDs and to learn about the spatial structure of their cold circumstellar envelopes. In several cases we found that the observed flux densities at were significantly higher than predicted from earlier star+disk models. In these cases the ISOPHOT data reveal the peak of the spectral energy distribution at wavelengths shorter than 100 micron, in spite of the IRAS measurements which show increasing SEDs at 100 micron. The difference is probably due to the larger beam of IRAS. The strong far-infrared emission observed indicates that a large amount of very cold dust has to be incorporated into the models of young intermediate mass stars. We model the new SEDs by a radiative transfer code, in order to determine the density and temperature structures of the circumstellar envelopes.
For the first time we mapped the circumstellar environment of several Herbig Ae/Be stars at . The highly oversampled maps, taken at 120, 150 or 200 with the C200 camera of ISOPHOT, were able to resolve the cold dust envelopes of three stars (LkHa 233, LkHa 234, MWC 1080), and to determine their spatial extensions.