X-shooter spectroscopy of young stellar objects

Abstract

Disks around T Tauri stars are known to lose mass, as best shown by the profiles of forbidden emission lines of low ionization species. At least two separate kinematic components have been identified, one characterised by velocity shifts of tens to hundreds km/s (HVC) and one with much lower velocity of few km/s (LVC). The HVC are convincingly associated to the emission of jets, but the origin of the LVC is still unknown. In this paper we analyze the forbidden line spectrum of a sample of 44 mostly low mass young stars in Lupus and $\sigma$-Ori observed with the X-Shooter ESO spectrometer. We detect forbidden line emission of [OI], [OII], [SII], [NI], and [NII], and characterize the line profiles as LVC, blue-shifted HVC and red-shifted HVC. We focus our study on the LVC. We show that there is a good correlation between line luminosity and both L$_{star}$ and the accretion luminosity (or the mass-accretion rate) over a large interval of values (L$_{star}$ $\sim 10^{-2} - 1$ L$_\odot$; L$_{acc}$ $\sim 10^{-5} - 10^{-1}$ L$_\odot$; $\dot M_{acc}$ $\sim 10^{-11} - 10^{-7}$ M$_\odot$/yr). The lines show the presence of a slow wind ($V_{peak}<20$ km/s), dense ($n_H>10^8$ cm$^{-3}$), warm (T$\sim 5000-10000$ K), mostly neutral. We estimate the mass of the emitting gas and provide a value for the maximum volume it occupies. Both quantities increase steeply with the stellar mass, from $\sim 10^{-12}$ M$_\odot$ and $\sim 0.01$ AU$^3$ for M$_{star}$$\sim 0.1$ M$_\odot$, to $\sim 3 \times 10^{-10}$ M$_\odot$ and $\sim 1$ AU$^3$ for M$_{star}$$\sim 1$ M$_\odot$, respectively. These results provide quite stringent constraints to wind models in low mass young stars, that need to be explored further.