Near-infrared Spectroscopic Study Of Aa Tau: Water And Oh Observations

To understand our own solar origins, we must investigate the composition of the protoplanetary disk from which the solar system formed. To infer this, we study analogs to the early solar system called T Tauri stars. These objects are low-mass, pre-main sequence stars surrounded by circumstellar disks of material from which planets are believed to form. We present high-resolution ($\lambda$/$\Delta$$\lambda$$\sim$25,000), near-infrared spectroscopic data from the T Tauri star AA Tau using NIRSPEC at the Keck II telescope, located on Mauna Kea, HI, taken in 2009 and 2010. AA Tau has a close to edge-on geometry, with an inclination of $70^{\circ}$ $\pm$ $10^{\circ}$ (Donati et al. 2010). Objects must have a nearly edge-on inclination for the disk to be sampled via absorption line spectroscopy. We observed strong absorption lines of both water and OH to which a spectroscopic model was fit in order for us to determine column density and rotational temperature. These near-infrared observations complement the work being done with ALMA, allowing us to probe the inner most disk regions and the chemistry contained within while ALMA primarily samples and is most sensitive to the outer disk