Photoelectric effect of dust grains by UV radiation is an important process for disk heating, but as a disk evolves, the amount of dust grains decreases. Photoeaporation is a disk dispersal process, which is caused by high-energy radiation. We perform a set of photoevaporation simulations solving hydrodynamics with radiative transfer and non-equilibrium chemistry in a self-consistent way. We run a series of simulations with varying the dust-to-gas mass ratio in a range . We show that H2 pumping and X-ray heating mainly contribute to the disk heating in case of and photoelectric effect mainly heats the gas in cases. The mass-loss profile changes significantly with respect to the main heating process. The outer disk is more efficiently dispersed when photoelectric effect is the main heating source.

The origin of the Brγ-line emission in Herbig Ae/Be stars is still an open question and might be related e.g., to a disc wind or the stellar magnetosphere. The study of the continuum and Brγ-emitting region of Herbig Ae/Be stars with high-spectral and high-spatial resolution gives great insights into the sub-au scale hydrogen gas distribution.

We observed the Herbig Be star MWC 120 with the VLTI/AMBER instrument in different spectral channels across the Brγ line with a spectral resolution of R~1500. Using radiative transfer modeling we found a radius of the line emitting region of ~0.4 au that is only two times smaller than the K-band continuum region. This is consistent with a disc wind scenario rather than an origin of magnetospheric emission.

We present near-infrared AMBER (R~12000) observations of the Herbig B[e] star MWC297 in the Brγ-line. We found that the near-infrared continuum emission is ~3.6 times more compact than the expected dust-sublimation radius, possibly indicating the presence of highly refractory dust grains or optically thick gas emission in the inner disk. Our velocity-resolved channel maps marking the first time that kinematic effects in the sub-AU inner regions of a protoplanetary disk could be directly imaged.

The catalog of 38,000 chromospherically active RAVE dwarfs represents one of the largest samples of young active solar-like and later-type single field stars in the Solar neighbourhood. It was established from the unbiased magnitude limited RAVE Survey using an unsupervised stellar classification algorithm based merely on stellar fluxes (Ca II infrared triplet). Using a newly-calibrated age-activity relation, ~15,000 active stars are estimated to be younger than 1 Gyr. Almost 2000 stars are presumably younger than ~100 Myr and possibly still in the pre-main sequence phase, the latter being supported by their significant offset from the main sequence in the NUV − V versus J − K space. 16,000 stars from the sample have positional and velocity vectors available (using TGAS parallaxes and proper motions and radial velocities from RAVE).

Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing ground- and space-based data from the far–UV to the millimeter, astronomers can assess the amount, composition, and location of circumstellar gas and dust as a function of time. We review primarily results from the Spitzer Space Telescope, with reference to other ground- and space-based observations. Comparing these results with those from exoplanet search techniques, theoretical models, as well as the inferred history of our solar system, helps us to assess whether planetary systems like our own, and the potential for life that they represent, are common or rare in the Milky Way galaxy.

Herbig Ae/Be stars are pre-main-sequence stars of intermediate mass, which are still accreting material from their environment, probably via a disk composed of gas and dust. Here we present a recent study of the geometry of the inner (AU-scale) circumstellar region around the Herbig Be star MWC 147 using long-baseline interferometry. By combining for the first time near- and mid-infrared spectro-interferometry on a Herbig star, our VLTI/AMBER and VLTI/MIDI data constrain not only the geometry of the brightness distribution, but also the radial temperature distribution in the disk. The emission from MWC 147 is clearly resolved and has a characteristic physical size of ∼1.3 AU and ∼9 AU at 2.2 μm and 11 μm respectively. This increase in apparent size towards longer wavelengths is much steeper than predicted by analytic disk models assuming power-law radial temperature distributions. For a detailed modeling of the interferometric data and the spectral energy distribution of MWC 147, we employ 2-D frequency-dependent radiation transfer simulations. This analysis shows that passive irradiated Keplerian dust disks can easily fit the SED, but predict much lower visibilities than observed, so these models can clearly be ruled out. Models of a Keplerian disk with emission from an optically thick inner gaseous accretion disk (inside the dust sublimation zone), however, yield a good fit of the SED and simultaneously reproduce the observed near- and mid-infrared visibilities. We conclude that the near-infrared continuum emission from MWC 147 is dominated by accretion luminosity emerging from an optically thick inner gaseous disk, while the mid-infrared emission also contains strong contributions from the passive irradiated dust disk.