AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 73. Young Stars
Display, Friday, January 8, 1999, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[73.11] A Comparison of Circumprimary and Circumsecondary Disks in Young Binary Systems

R. J. White, A. M. Ghez (UCLA)

We present a high resolution survey conducted at NASA's IRTF at K (2.2 \mum) and L (3.6 \mum) of ~40 T Tauri binary stars with separations of 10-1000 AU. The K-L colors of the primaries and the secondaries are used to identify and to characterize circumprimary and circumsecondary accretion disks. Although we find several systems with only a circumprimary disk, we find no systems with only a circumsecondary disk. This suggests that circumprimary disks are longer lived. Furthermore, for systems in which both components support a circumstellar disk, the primary star is usually as red or redder in K-L than the secondary. This may indicate that primary stars, on average, have a higher accretion rate. Together these findings suggest that circumprimary disks must either be more massive or preferentially replenished.


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