Probing the inner part of protoplanetary disks with the VLTI

Young stellar objects offer a rich circumstellar environment, indirectly revealed by photometry, spectroscopy and imaging, such as accretion disks, stellar companions, optical jets, stellar winds, etc. Most of these phenomena occur in a region whose size is less than 1 AU viewed at distances ranging from 140 pc to 450 pc depending on the star forming regions. Therefore optical interferometry in general and the VLTI in particular which provides milli- arcsecond spatial resolution is a powerful tool to probe the physics in these regions. Detecting the thermal emission of optically thick accretion disks is one of the clues to understand the still poorly known physics of close circumstellar environment. In this paper we focus on the results from a numerical code simulating the vertical structure of an accretion disk around a T Tauri star. The visibility and closure phase curves are interpreted in the framework of the VLTI with the AMBER instrument.

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